


Another Lover Hits The Universe

by theprophetlemonade



Series: Our Lives Are Not Our Own [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Space, Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Bad Decisions, Don't Fuck The Alien, F/F, Future AU, Gen, Hard Science, Implied Reincarnation, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Lesbians in Space, Major Character Injury, Mentions of Racism, Mentions of alcohol, Morality, Outer Space, Philosophy, Space AU, Space Flight, Space Horror, Space Opera, Spaceships, Speculative fiction, Telepathic Bond, Telepathy, background JeanMarco - Freeform, black hole, implied springles, sci fi, self discovery, self hatred, space disaster, third person, yumikuri
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-08-09 20:43:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 48,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7816564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theprophetlemonade/pseuds/theprophetlemonade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year is 2153. Carbon dioxide levels on planet Earth have led to the human race - or those that can afford it - abandoning their home planet for orbital colonies scattered across the solar system. But people want to be grounders again. Humans who might have never even set foot on real, solid ground long for another world that they can’t destroy with the same mistakes.</p><p>Ymir has yearned for the stars far longer than she has been a starship pilot for the IASA. Home holds nothing but bad memories and worse regrets. She searches for answers amongst the constellations, longs for some semblance of purpose in the universe, begs black holes for a second chance at the things she has left behind on Earth. </p><p>On a frontier mission to the heart of the Milky Way, plundering new stars for hospitable planets upon which to replant the human race, Ymir's resolve as a captain is tested in ways she never quite expected when a diversion off-course results in an inexplicable discovery that terrifies her beyond measure. </p><p>Alternatively: lesbians in space where everything that could go wrong, goes wrong. But in a hopeful sort of way. Also Sasha is a robot. C'mon.</p><p>Updates every few months.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Aquarius

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goldiealchemy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldiealchemy/gifts).



_I saw the world from the stars’ point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely._

 

— Shaun David Hutchinson, _We Are the Ants_

 

 

 

_It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves._

**—** William Shakespeare

 

  
_Perhaps_  
_we may meet each other in a dream._

— Marina Tsvetaeva, _Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems_

 

 

 

* * *

 

* * *

 

 

Stardate: _82153.10, 2567 days since Mars departure_

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER ADDRESSING CAMERA, PROVIDENTIA BRIDGE]

[TRANSCRIPT] _Captain’s Log: first day out of cryo. All crew alive and well, if a little hungry for some real food. Some queasiness, but nothing serious. I still maintain that we shoulda blasted Flight Engineer Yaeger’s cryo pod out of the airlock but apparently murder is still murder under martial law. Hell, it shouldn’t even be called martial law - we’re in outer space -_

[INAUDIBLE SHOUT FROM OFF-SCREEN]

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER LOOKS OFF-SCREEN MOMENTARILY]

_Uh, my bad. I haven’t done one of these in like seven years. But I guess seven years isn’t long enough for Jean to take the stick out of his ass. Anyway. How does it go again?_

_Search for hospitable planet Janus II remains unimpeded. Journey into deep space continues. Something like that?_

 

* * *

 

“Congratulations, guys. We are now the deepest into space that humankind has ever been.”

There’s a beat of silence for a moment – vacuous and obsolete – until static fizzles across the comms system.

“Shit, Captain?” comes Eren’s voice, a little more tinny and crackled than usual. “I think I left my toothbrush back on Earth. We gotta go back.”

Ymir snorts – and the buzzing that burps across the comms sounds like her other crew members trying not to giggle – and settles into her seat. The bridge is empty, save for her and the stars ahead. The blackness is abyssal, but there’s something about it that’s alive and breathing and beckoning. She doesn’t know these stars; these are constellations no other human has seen before. She needs time to get to know them, to learn their stories, to chart their extremities across the cosmos. That’s why she’s here, and not sat behind the simulation panel of some lunar rover.

“We’ve been up here for seven and a half years,” Jean retorts across the comms wolfishly. Ymir can hear the crooked grin on his lips. She slumps down in her seat and props her bare feet up onto the dusty command console, all lit up in a cluster of red and green lights. “How have you only just noticed?”

“Well, shit, Kirschtein,” Eren – flight engineer – laments sarcastically. “I haven’t exactly been going over my grocery list whilst I’ve been on ice.”

 

Ymir hears Jean’s sharp intake of breath across the comms – she knows her co-pilot likes to overstep the mark between playful teasing when it comes to one-upping her engineer. She interrupts before Jean says something snarky with a droll laugh of her own.

“Okay, okay, let’s calm down now, kids. Where’s the closest Space Target where Eren can buy a new toothbrush? We’re gonna have to cancel this mission. Oral hygiene is way more important than the future of the human race.”

Both Jean and Eren snort, and the comms system blips out again into static, and then metronomic silence. Ymir can hear the blood beating in her ears. It’s been a while.

Hell – it’s been more than a while. It’s been almost eight years since they left the Mars base, and another ten months before that since they set off from Lunar Base 7. She’s older now – and it’s weird to think that she remembers none of it. Cryopreservation is always a trip.

Absent-mindedly, she runs a hand through her messy hair. It’s still damp, and a little cold. The silence is making her ears ring.

She needs to get used to the quiet again.

“So. How’s everyone doing on our first day out of cryo?” she says, leaning her head back against the headrest of her chair. It’s not as comfy as she remembers. “Anyone got frostbite? No lost limbs? Still got all your memories?”

“All limbs accounted for,” comes Mikasa’s voice, thin but assured, and clearer than Eren’s was, wherever it was coming from. “I’ve done everyone’s checks, but yours, Captain. You should visit me in the med bay when you have the chance.”

“Will do, Doc,” Ymir smiles, nodding her head. Something bleeps overhead, and she turns an eye to it lazily. Armin is testing out their signalling beacon. All seems to be working after so long on stasis, sailing through the quiet. “How’s my Martian doing? Has the queasiness cleared up?”

“That nickname gets old after so many years, Captain,” chirps a male voice, overlapping with Mikasa’s huff. “You don’t call Annie, Titan, do you? Or Jean, Moonboy. What should I call you?  Earthworm?”

“Sounds like cryo froze your heart, Bodt,” Ymir snarks, amidst the sniggering of other crew members across the speakers. “I’m gonna box your ears when I get down there. Or, y’know, I’m sure I can find an airlock to float you in.”

“That’s murder,” Jean interrupts, his voice sounding a little clearer than before as he meanders through the underbelly of the ship where white noise interrupts the comms the least.

“We’re under martial law out here,” Ymir retorts. “And last time I checked, I was the highest ranking officer on this ship. My space boat, my rules. And if I wanna murder someone, I damn well will. And you, Jean - how damn long does it take to get back to the bridge?”

 

“This long,” comes Jean’s voice, sharp and brisk, from over Ymir’s shoulder. She spins around in her seat to face him, kicking her legs off the control panel; he’s still in his undergarments from cryo – or at least, some of them. His pants hang low on his bony hips – no doubt a result of being fed protein packs through a tube for the last 2700 days – and he has his shirt draped around his neck, hanging down over his bare shoulders. His thin chest glistens with sweat in the hollow of his breast bone, and his hair is messy and unruly, still damp from the ice, and tangled undoubtedly by some scrabbling fingers.

“Sorry,” Jean shrugs cheekily, running his tongue across his teeth, “Had to go via the med bay.”

“Sure you did,” Ymir deadpans, raising her eyebrows flatly. “Couldn’t keep it in your pants for seven and a half years, huh?”

“A man has urges,” Jean shrugs, although his cheeks colour coyly. He slips past Ymir and drops into his co-pilot’s seat, flipping a switch on the control panel flippantly. “I’ve been staring at the backs of my eyelids for way too long. Wanted to have a lil’ bit of something else, seeing as it’s our first day back out of the fridge.”

Ymir scoffs, rolling her eyes, and there’s a thump of silence before she speaks again.

“What’s it like to … do that in zero-G anyway? I thought Third Law woulda made it a lil’, uh- tricky.”

Jean chokes violently, flushing dark red up to the shell of his ear.

“We do have artificial gravity on this boat, y’know!”

“Yeah, I know.”

He squints at her for a moment, dirty and accusatory, and then leans back in his seat, arms folded across his chest in an attempt to feign indifference.

“... Marco switched the gravity off,” he says candidly, “It was awesome.”

Ymir can’t bite back her guttural laugh, and even Jean grins, his cheeks warm and his eyes cast away. And then Mikasa interjects unapologetically across the intercom.

“Captain, you do know the comms are still on, right?”

The sound of Jean’s forehead hitting the control panel echoes loudly throughout the silence of deep space, followed by Armin – communications officer – scolding him across the speakers as he sets off an alarm in the communications’ hub by doing so.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, it’s nice to float. When she was first training on the ground with NASA, the antigravity was novel and exciting and something out of the realms of the science fiction telenovelas that sometimes played on the HoloNet, in place of any new motion pictures being made in the carcass of old Hollywood driven bust by lack of need and funds and people. But it - the antigravity - got tiring really quick, especially after she moved to the ISS and every day was just another space J-walk with the kids in the Lunar academy or roll in the sim pod or losing her pen and finding it stuck to the ceiling after ten minutes’ looking.

But after so long in the cryo tubes, Ymir’s legs feel stiff and her chest still feels heavy, as if the weight of cold water still presses down upon her ribs. She slips out of bridge with a sly smile, leaving Jean to the merciless teasing of Eren, and the sympathetic apologising of their Martian, Marco Bodt, and flips off the artificial gravity in the tunnels down to the medbay.

She doesn’t start floating immediately. It starts with the feeling of a dip in her stomach – the same as when she would drive her truck on Earth too fast over a bump in the road – and then it’s like strings tied around her fingers and toes, raising her like a puppet on a wire.

It feels inelegant when her feet lift from the ground – all gangly limbs and wobbling where she can find no upright sense of balance and her arms want to flail, to catch herself – but when she lets herself tip forward into a Superman position, it feels like riding a bike. She always remembers.

She glides through the corridors of the ship – her ship, the Providentia, an ISS-built Hyperion, a great, hulking beast of a spaceship, currently tumbling through the recesses of unknown space like little more than a leaf caught on the wind, inconsequential and small – pulling herself along with her hands, enjoying the weightlessness of the dream that enraptured humanity long before space travel became a necessity, and not just a triumph.

She drifts past the doors to the canteen, knocking cheerily on the glass of the round window and grabbing the attention of Eren and Dr. Connie Springer – her geologist – as they laugh around the trays of tasteless food that no doubt taste likes banquets after so long asleep. They both offer her a wave in return, before rolling back into bawdy laughter that is silenced by the sealed doors.

The med bay is far from the bridge – but not quite far enough that Ymir wants to put her feet back on the floor when she arrives at the door. She lets herself float for a moment, tries a forward roll in mid-air and knocks her forehead on the wall, and then lies back, suspended, with her hands clasped behind her head.

She doesn’t need to be able to see the stars to hear the silence. It pervades every crack and orifice of the ship, one way or another. Even within the hollow, white walls, the noiselessness has no edges to be found. Her aloneness is tangible.

 

* * *

 

Dr. Mikasa Ackerman never planned to be an astronaut, but it suits her just well enough.

When Ymir hits the button on the med bay doors, and they slide open, Mikasa does not look like she just stepped out of a cryo tube. Her hair has been dried and neatly combed, the sharp angle of her bob like a sleek slice across her pale jaw. She has lost a little body mass since their deep freeze, but muscle still sculpts her arms and shoulders, and she fills out her thermal suit and overscrubs well.

(Ymir has always known that if Mikasa Ackerman was DTF in zero gravity, she wouldn’t question it. The doctor is hot, and Ymir’s got blue balls the size of small planets. She understands Jean more than she’d care to admit.)

(Such a shame it all sounds so damn … _unprofessional_ whenever she considers asking the doctor to accompany her to storage for a quick fumble in the dark.)

Mikasa looks up when Ymir steps through the doors – almost stumbling with the reintervention of the gravity she just turned back on – and a small smile quirks her lips.

“Captain,” she says warmly, tucking the HoloTab in her hands beneath her arm. “Kind of you to drop in.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ymir says, waving her away casually. The metal bed in the centre of the room is empty, save for some rumpled sheets which Ymir fails to question before she hops up onto them. “Came to check on my Martian. Never seen a kid look so pale coming out of deep sleep. Figured he was gonna keel over at any minute.”

“I’m not that pathetic,” comes Marco’s voice as he appears around the corner of the divider set up in the corner of the room, rolling his shirt down over his stomach. There’s exertion in his cheeks, but a liveliness in his eyes that would reassure Ymir, if she didn’t already know the reasons for it. “Miks says there’s nothing to worry about. I’m fine. It was just the longest I’ve ever been under before. They don’t train you for that in sim. It was bound to happen. I can still walk.”

“Can clearly do more than that,” Ymir snarks, raising both her eyebrows accusingly. Mikasa snorts lightly, returning to thumb through the notes on her HoloTab again, and Marco turns red. He shyly itches the end of his nose.

“Y-yeah. Well –”

“Seeing as I have you both here,” Mikasa interrupts pointedly, “Marco, jump up on the table beside the Capsicle. I’ve got vitamin shots for the both of you. And Cap, you need to take a contraceptive.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m gonna need that. I’m not the one boning boys on this ship.”

Mikasa frowns.

“You know it’s not for that,” she scowls. “Now, arms out. Palms up. You’ll feel a little prick.”

 

* * *

 

Marco is still rubbing the crook of his elbow when he offers to accompany Ymir back to the bridge. He’s a sweet thing, Ymir has always thought – but then again, botanists always are. They’re not in space to colonise planets and thunder amongst the stars. They want to grow potato plants in the soil of some distant world. Ymir respects that sort of simplicity.

She picked him up on Mars – the crew had been in space ten months by then, and already gelled (or, at least, learned to tolerate, in the case of Jean and Eren) – and she had been unsure about adding an extra body to her mission at first. The thought of lives being her responsibility had terrified her when they had first left the outer reaches of the moon’s orbit, and the journey to Mars had only let her dwell on it and her new, inexperienced captaincy.

But – but that had been before they were greeted off the Providentia by Marco’s smiling face and his dreams of escaping the gravitational pull of his desolate home , and before Ymir had accidentally walked in on him and Jean doing the dirty in the station simulator one night when Jean was meant to be fetching supplies.

It seems like a long time ago now – and truthfully, it was – but Marco had only been with them a few months, to the outer reaches of the asteroid belt, before they went into cryopreservation for the long journey to the edges of the chartered Milky Way.

So, Ymir doesn’t _know_ Marco Bodt. But she feels like she does. He’s an easy person to get along with, and he actually does what she asks – most of the time. It’s a real plus.

They walk slowly back to the bridge, Marco chatting amicably about the chance to see those constellations never seen before – by him, or by any human being as it were – and Ymir zones out, letting her head drift where her feet cannot.

Jean has already made himself back at home when they get back to the bridge – although he’s still missing his shirt, and Ymir glares at Marco when she sees him checking out the co-pilot. Jean has his feet up on the still-dusty console – and whilst Ymir can’t scold him for something she does on the regular – she could tell him off for the fact he already has a nicotine Twizzler in his mouth, and another one propped behind his ear.

(They’re meant to last him the entire journey – because it’s not like he can smoke aboard the ship –  but Ymir knows he’s going to get through them way quicker than that, and then he’s going to be a grumpy grouch all the way home.)

She decides not to get a head start on upsetting him, and settles instead for kicking his feet away from the control panel as she slips into her pilot’s seat beside him. Marco wanders up behind Jean and ducks his head over the shoulder rest, popping a chaste kiss on the shell of Jean’s ear. Jean grins; Ymir deliberately gags.

Jean’s grin turns to a juvenile scowl, and he sticks his tongue out. Ymir mirrors the expression, and Marco sighs heavily, undoubtedly ruing the day he met a Captain and her Second-in-Command so exasperatingly childish.

“There might be some messages from home waiting for us,” he says plainly, rolling his fingertips across Jean’s shoulder. “Has anyone turned on the Auxiliary yet?”

“She prefers to be called SASHA,” Jean remarks casually, looking back over his shoulder before he stage whispers, “She doesn’t like being reminded that she’s not real.”

“She’s a computer, not a fairy,” Ymir retorts, leaning into the console to flip a few switches, before pulling up her keyboard, a computer monitor descending from a vault in the ceiling to conceal her view out into the void. She enters her password, and pulls up the on-board operating system. “And I was just enjoying flying silent whilst we still had the chance. You weren’t on-board before Mars, Marco. You’re gonna get tired of her jokes very quickly. Operating systems shouldn’t _ever_ have been given intuition.”

She stabs enter on her keyboard, something whirs overhead, and a blue light appears on the console. It blinks a few times - reminding Ymir of a fluttering eye upon waking prematurely - and then there’s a beep.

[ **S** YSTEM **A** CCESS **S** TRUCTURE **A** ND **H** EURISTIC **A** UXILIARY: ONLINE]

[UPDATING DATA]

The words flicker blue across Ymir’s screen, and she hums as she scrolls down the Linux menu, eyes casting over the settings – debating briefly what kicks she would get out of changing the operating language to Martian Spanish and then hiding her password from Jean until he figures he’s the only one in the observable universe fluent in only one language in the 22nd century – but clicks enter again when Jean glares at her sidelong.

“Systems online,” she says pre-emptively, “Sash, you there?”

“Good morning, Captain,” comes the automated, yet cheerful voice across the intercom, clear and present. “Or, maybe good afternoon? Would you like Earth time, or Mars time? I can also do Lunar time, or one of fifty other known planetary bodies. I still haven’t synced my clock yet –”

“Earth time is fine, Sash,” Ymir snorts, fingers rattling across her keyboard as a few more commands appear in bright blue writing on her screen. “How was your sleep? Anything wake you up whilst we were under?”

“Nothing to report,” Sasha replies. “I slept like a baby. Theoretically, of course, because computers cannot sleep, let alone like a human infant, but – how was your sleep, Captain?”

“Cold. And wet. Wouldn’t recommend.”

“It would fry my circuits.”

“Exactly. Don’t try it.”

“How’s our course looking anyway, Sasha?” Jean interrupts, leaning across the console to turn on his own monitor. It descends from the roof with a whir. “How far out from the edge of the universe are we?”

“Approaching the edge of the universe is impossible for spacecraft, Jean,” Sasha replies automatically. “But if you mean how far away from the planet Janus II we are, I can confirm we have just passed beyond the edge of the constellation Sagittarius.”

“And the black hole?” Jean asks, “When do we get to see that?”

“My calculations suggest that Sagittarius A-Star should be visible from the Providentia by humans within 72 hours. Gravitational lensing currently prevents our systems from establishing a clear image. Our velocity should not be affected by any gravitational pull as long as we remain on our current trajectory.”

“Nice,” Jean says, leaning back in his seat, “Remind me why we’re interested in some dwarf planet orbiting a black hole, again?”

“The planet Janus II showed signs of liquid water and habitable biospheres upon its surface in recent telescopic investigations –”

“Rhetorical question, Sash.”

“Oh. Right, I’m still working on those.”

Silence prevails again – and Ymir realises that she should stop being so surprised by it, given that noise is more unusual in space than silence. The quiet is the natural state of things.

But in the silence, she thinks about the body of rock they’re heading towards at a velocity too fast for humans to really comprehend: a tiny, iron-core planet balancing on the rim of some black hole, not quite falling into the depths of some great nowhere, but wobbling upon the rim of it like some basketball upon a hoop. She wonders if everyone else is thinking the same thing too; if Jean and Marco and all her crew are wondering if they really have to come all the way to the epicentre of the Milky Way to find the only world supposedly habitable for humans, only for it to be straddling the line of being flushed away into an oblivion none of them can fathom.

Humans have lived in space for almost one hundred years now. There are space stations orbiting four planets and five moons of the Milky Way, and people like Jean – who were born on the lunar base and lived there all their lives – have never seen grass, real grass, that grows beneath the sky. And not in some plastic biochamber.

But Ymir knows grass. She knows trees, and earth, and the way carbon dioxide burns her lungs on the days she would push her curfew just to stay outdoors a little longer. The air on-board the Prov is not as sweet as she remembers, not as rich in oxygen as it was when they first left Mars. Ymir tastes the stale tingle of CO2 already in the ventilation system, and wishes it was a taste she hadn’t been brought up on. It tingles upon her tongue, acidic; tastes like gaps in the windowpanes that couldn’t afford to be fixed, like blood on the bedsheets, like family coughing up lungs to old and too young. She was born on Earth, and she knows how much humans – humans who might have never even set foot on real, solid ground – long for another that they can’t fuck up with the same mistakes.

People want to be grounders again. They don’t want to be Martians, or fuck in zero-G – not really. It doesn’t matter if they’re poor and left behind, choking on their insides at barely twenty-five and wanting to escape; or if they’re rich, and take for granted a life in plastic halls and thrumming engines, dallying daydreams in romantic visions of the past world. Everyone wants the same, for one reason or another. They want an Earth to call home.

That’s why they’re here, Ymir and her crew. That’s why they’re this deep in space. For the rebirth of the human race.

Black holes be damned.

(She would damn them anyway, even if she believed resolutely in the arrogance of thieves planting flags claiming to be the colonisers of dreams. Black holes swallow up dreams as much as they swallow up arrogance and conceit and wicked ideas that would not have been wicked one hundred years gone by.)

“I’ve never seen a black hole before,” Marco pipes up. His voice is a little quiet. “Only in pictures.”

“Me neither,” Jean says, “Cap has though – haven’t you? When you were still a pilot back on the Cassiopeia, right? With Commander Smith? Damn, that was a long time ago. You’re getting on.”

Ymir smacks her co-pilot in the arm unsympathetically.

“Not that long ago, punk,” she gripes, before glancing up at Marco. “We were heading for a mining planet. The star at the centre of the system had only just died. The Corporal – Levi – stayed on board whist the Commander and me and some of the crew went down to the surface. He was forty five when we came back. Didn’t even cryo once whilst we were gone.”

Marco frowns.

“How old was he when you left?”

“Twenty-seven.,” Ymir says flatly, “It was only two hours for me.  Went down to the surface, tested the atmosphere, realised there wasn’t as much uranium in the soil as we first thought to make the place profitable, then came back. Relativity fucks you up.”

“I guess that explains a lot,” Jean smarts, earning another glare and another smack on the arm. He laughs brashly to himself, before swiping his monitor to the side, and turning to stare out the window and into the stars, pointedly. “You said it was like blackness you’ve never seen before. Like, you can think space is empty, until you look into a black hole. And it’s all void.”

“Surprised you can remember that,” Ymir murmurs, “Weren’t we off our faces on a spacewalk on Phobos? Worst hangover of my fucking life, but the sunrise sure was great that morning.”

Jean smirks, the memory stirring something warm and nostalgic inside him. Ymir feels sentimental too. It’s not a feeling she regularly indulges, but when they’re the only eight people in any direction for millions of miles, she can afford to reflect on what they’ve left behind.

She and Jean have had some good laughs since they met all that time ago. (A strip club on Lunar Base 7, if she remembers correctly. She was on leave from the Cassiopeia, drowning her sorrows; he was celebrating graduating top of his class from the IASA academy. He was so loud and obnoxious. She threw her drink on him. What a waste.)

Those are better memories than staring into vortexes to other times, other places, or probably just other nowheres. Better than throwing the copper coin of questions into the well, and watching it sink slowly with a wish, only to lose it to the murky depths. Better than watching things that they hold so dearly and disvalue so readily – like time – be swallowed up without hesitation.

She still sees those darkest corners of space behind her eyelids when she blinks.

“Captain, would you like me to let you know when the black hole becomes visible?”

“That would be great, Sash,” Ymir replies, softly, “And can you play some music? I’m not used to the silence yet.”

“Dr. Springer is currently playing David Bowie in the canteen. Would you like me to patch it through?”

“Bowie?” Jean scoffs, “Are we living in the fucking Stone Age? I know we don’t get much new music these days, but c’mon. Sash, play something from this century, would you?”

“Bowie is fine,” Ymir overrules, not batting an eyelid. “Life On Mars?”

“Of course,” Sasha responds. “Dr. Springer regularly tells me that it is his favourite. He has been playing it on repeat for three hours now.”

The song seeps onto the bridge in the middle of a high note and the trill of an electric guitar. Jean groans, unhooking the nicotine Twizzler from his ear and chomping down on it angrily; Marco bites his lip around a smile, and nudges Jean until the co-pilot shimmies across his seat to give Marco a knee to perch on. The comms system flares for a moment with a loud yodel from Connie and Eren as they sing into the speakers in the canteen, and then they laugh, and then they disappear again.

Ymir smirks, rocking back in her seat and returning her feet to the command console. She motions with her hand for her monitor to move, and then, stretching out ahead of her again, is the canopy of foreign stars, and the territory of giants.

 

* * *

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked – a long, long time ago – what the people of Earth would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No-one would go to bed that night, of course – something better than Christmas for children, something more spiritual that the solstice for people who worship the Earth and not the sky. There would be hysteria, ecstatic and delirious in some sort of religious panic.

Ymir has lived almost all her life amongst the stars. She left Earth when she was seventeen, scouted by NASA for astronaut training aboard the International Space Station. There was nothing left on Earth, they had said, save oceans too acidic and days too hot and irradiation so strong that it would turn her skin to a bubbling mass of tumours if she stayed outside more than a day.

She’s lived on the Moon, and on Mars for a bit, and she’s been to Titan and Europa too, and she’s travelled. She’s travelled more than most, and things like stars should not still make her heart hitch, but –

She remembers the foggy, hazy moments of a childhood spent looking up. Seeing space beyond her window still makes her have to stop for a moment; it still makes her breath catch. She still is suspended in the pricks of silver and cosmic pink that stretch and sprawl like some web of celestial neurons beyond her window, part of some greater meaning that she is just too small to understand. She still grasps the straws of some blind hope that, light years away, all the questions she has yet to ask herself might be answered. In that place, she matters some.

She remembers her first moonwalk explicitly. She’d stood on the lip of the Lunar Base 7 crater, and looked back at Earth, and cried silently into her helmet. She hadn’t felt tall. She had felt very, very tiny, the weight of her cosmic insignificance both revelling and repulsive. Maybe what she felt was the ridiculousness of human conceit: how they had destroyed their only home, and hadn’t even tried to save it when they realised they were killing it. Maybe it was the realisation that no-one else in the universe really cared about one tiny little race dying out in some corner of it, or trying desperately to build homes in space where they would never really belong.

Maybe it was just the thought of being free.

She hasn’t told anyone about crying. And she doesn’t plan to. She has a reputation to uphold.

But it doesn’t mean she can’t sympathise, in her own, backwards, emotionally-compromised way.

When she goes down to the data hub, she recognises that same, rabbit-blind quasi-panic on the face of her communications officer. He flits between computers like a headless chicken, fingers rattling away as he backtracks through seven and a half years of transmission data, and he has screens pulled down over all the windows, which he’s vehemently ignoring anyway.

Ymir slips into the hub as quietly as she can; Armin doesn’t look up, too absorbed in numbers and figures and ones and zeros, but Annie – a Titan-born mission specialist Ymir hired from the military ranks of the Europan space port for this very task – is perched in the corner with a HoloTab in her lap, and looks up wordlessly at her captain.

Ymir nods, and reaches up to push one of the screens away from the window. Beyond, she sees the Ferris-wheel structure of the Providentia – the canteen and the living quarters – go revolving past, like clockwork. The stars are still there. It’s nice to check. Maybe she feels a little less alone when they can watch her.

Armin Arlert is from Earth too. Like Eren, like Dr. Ackerman, like her. Apparently Earth astronauts are hard to come by these days – because everyone from home is so poor and can barely afford to live or eat or breathe, let alone leave the ground – but there are four of them in this crew.

He’s not like Eren though, with a hunkering for the stars. He had been working in a hub on Base 5 when Ymir had met him, looking to hire a comms officer for her ship, once she had been assigned the mission. Someone good with code, who knew how to read computers, and look at numbers and not see nonsense – and there had been Eren’s friend, a small, skinny boy-barely-a-man, who had never set foot on a spaceship in his life, save to leave Earth.

He’s never been in deep space before. He doesn’t wear it behind his eyes well. It’s probably pretty daunting.

“You should go see the Doc,” Ymir says blatantly, and Armin startles noticeably. “She’ll give you something to calm your nerves.”

“I’m f-fine, honestly,” he says, but he’s not. Ymir can tell. “There’s just a lot to catch up on, and I, uh – it’s a little overwhelming. I’m fine, Captain.”

“He’s hasn’t got his head around being older,” Annie supplies in a deadpan. “He’s twenty-four now.”

“Twenty-four, huh?” Ymir muses, “Guess we missed the big two-one. You can drink in space now, y’know. Wanna celebrate?”

Armin shares a queasy smile, as if he’s not convinced by her attempts to console him, but doesn’t want her to notice. (Too bad. Ymir is good at reading people.)

“Maybe later,” he admits ruefully, “I have a lot of transmission data to check through. I think we went through an electromagnetic storm on the bypass of Proxima Centuari. It … the system needs recalibrating. Too much background noise.”

“It’s fine,” Ymir shrugs, dropping down onto an overturned crate, no doubt knocked over in Armin’s flightfulness. “I can wait ‘til you’re done. I’ve got time. Not got much going on. No big deal.”

“Do you not have a log to record?” Annie remarks unsparingly, not raising her eyes from her HoloTab.  “Or, perhaps, a ship to pilot?”

“Sasha’s got the wheel, and Jean is on the bridge with the Martian and a libido he hasn’t answered to for seven and a half years. I’ve _got_ time.”

Annie raises her eyebrows and purses her lips into a thin line, eyes flickering over the information that scrolls across her screen as she flicks through it absently. She probably won’t say anything else, but Ymir knows she’ll be judging silently from the corner, where she’s curled up in her chair. Ymir’s still working on winning her around. She’ll get there. 

Ymir settles back onto the crate and folds her arms across her chest, watching as Armin frantically clatters away on three keyboards at once, eyes darting between multiple screens as blue numbers scroll down them in endless columns that make Ymir’s head hurt.

She lasts five minutes before she starts to fidget. Armin doesn’t have a penchant for David Bowie whilst he works; the silence prevails again, like a drip, drip, drip of a leaky faucet, hanging on the cusp of unbearableness with each metronomic second.

She crosses and uncrosses her legs; runs her fingers through her still-damp hair and grimaces when they catch on knotty tangles; fidgets with the zip on her flight jacket until Annie spares her a withering look telling her firmly to stop making that incessant noise.

“Hey, Armin,” Ymir whines, sweating a little under Annie’s icy blue stare. “You got that time capsule kicking around down here?”

“Time capsule?”

“Yeah,” Ymir says, glancing around at the mess of wires and cables tangled around her feet. “It’s a NASA thing. They always make you bring artefacts with you on new planet trips. Just in case there are locals. Like a peace offering or something. Because apparently aliens would appreciate the back end of our record collections and some antique paintings we don’t want anymore.”

“I don’t think anyone considered the relative use of Neo Cubism to primordial amoeba,” Annie remarks dryly, before adding, “I think it’s in the crate you’re sitting on, Captain.”

Ymir hops from the crate with a noise of surprise and squats down beside it, flipping the lid. There’s a box inside the box: older, dirtier, made of rusting metal and not white plastic and polymer wires, as with everything else on her ship. Armin stops his typing to glance over his shoulder, caught by the vice of curiosity, and even Annie spares a look from her tablet.

Ymir usually has a nosey at what NASA sends along for the ride – sometimes they’re given interesting things to take to these faraway worlds: out-dated technology, copies of old books made from actual paper that smell of glue and dust and Earth, and, if they’re lucky, films kept on discs that she’s finally figured out how to play on their modern hardware. As far as she’s concerned, there’s no harm having the odd movie night on their trip through the stars. It’s always an idea to check out what cargo they’re carrying. (And she has a penchant for the long-dead Hollywood stars – when Hollywood was still a thing, and not the wasteland it is today – from the golden age of filmmaking. Her favourite is Cate Blanchett. There’s something timeless about her that Ymir enjoys.)

It doesn’t look like there are any movies this time. Her eyes usually fly straight to the boxes – because films used to come in boxes, brightly-coloured with plastic covers and blurbs on the back – and she throws everything aside to see if she’s seen them before.

Ymir frowns heavily, sifting through the contents of the capsule for what isn’t there. There are some old letters, bundled up with twine (very retro), and what looks like a cellular phone from when people still used those. Some photographs of old paintings, which Ymir thinks she’s seen in textbooks before. An Oxford English dictionary. A copy of Keith Shadis’ History of Phobos, written in Martian Spanish.

No movies. It’s a pretty poor selection, if ever she’s seen. She sighs defeatedly, slumping back on her haunches. Maybe she can steal the Shadis book for a read. Maybe she can go float herself in the airlock. Probably the more riveting use of her time.

“Are those letters?” Armin says, surprising Ymir when he leans over her shoulder, extending a tentative finger to point at the bundle of papers in the box. Something sparkles in his blue, July-sky eyes. “They look old. I haven’t seen many like that before.”

“Huh,” Ymir muses, reaching into the box to grab the stack. The tea-stained paper feels almost leathery beneath her fingers. “Yeah. Mid-twenty first century, maybe? Third World War? Or earlier?”

“Probably earlier,” Armin considers thoughtfully, enraptured when Ymir clumsily undoes the twine that binds them. “Handwritten letters aren’t common.”

Ymir takes the first envelope from the pile, and hands the rest to Armin, who is far more thoughtful and careful in handling them. In the months between the moon and Mars, before cryo, she had too often found him curled up in some lonely corner of the ship with words pulled up on a HoloTab and an inscrutable look of concentration upon his face. _Stories_ , she had eventually forced out of him. Sometimes not, but he had admitted to her that he reads manuals so often that sometimes he needs a break. He likes fiction, even though he says it’s hard to get his hands on nowadays. History is good too. They still teach that in some of the schools not for the astronauts; he had a friend or two that leant him old textbooks – paper-printed and everything – which he had scanned into his personal data packet before they left. At first, she had wondered why he liked books so much, her confusion probably something to do with her own meagre attention span – but nowadays, she’s pretty sure it has something to do with the way she likes spaceships. Because they let her go somewhere far, far away from the places she has been.

She flips the letter over in her hands, but the envelope is unaddressed, only a name scrawled in a messy hand, unintelligible to her with all its loops and rushed lines. She unpeels the flap carefully, but the glue has long since dried out and it comes open in her hands with ease.

There are three sheets of paper inside, filled from margin to margin with the same messy handwriting save for one, which boasts a drawing of a young man with a noble silhouette. It’s good – a good sketch, from the little she knows of art that isn’t grounded in engineering and technical drawing. It’s also oddly personal. Ymir’s not sure it’s appropriate content to be sending out into the deeper reaches of their universe.

“They’re in Earth German. I’m … I don’t read very much German,” Armin murmurs quietly from behind; he sounds a little awestruck. “I think they’re love letters.”

“Huh,” Ymir muses, “I wonder how they got here, of all places.”

“Captain,” interrupts Sasha’s voice from somewhere above. “I’m sorry for interrupting, but my on-board records say that the letters originate from the year 1941, author and recipient unknown. They were recently uncovered in an excavation expedition in Normandy, before the country became autonomous from French government.”

“Ah,” Ymir says, putting the letter in her hand back into the box, “They really are old, then.”

 

* * *

 

Ymir doesn’t tend to bring much in the way of personal artefacts with her when she’s flying. Admittedly, they’re not allowed to bring more than just a small rucksack of things to remind them of home, but, truth be told, she has never had much in the way of sentimentals to bring with her on long trips.

Connie brings bundles and bundles of data packets full of music; Mikasa brings training weights for her wrists and ankles for when she’s in the shuttle gym; Jean brings photos of home that he pins up around his bunk, a cruel reminder of the fact he’s one of the few of them who still has family who cares for how long he’s gone.

Ymir’s moved around so much throughout her life that she’s spent most of it living out of a suitcase. She’s never had more than a bunk room to herself; she doesn’t spend her pay check on collecting old books and contraband movies; she’s never had a girlfriend to take cute photos of to pin to the console in the bridge.

Maybe it’s a lonely life to be living. She doesn’t try to dwell on it too much, distracting herself with things that matter.

Teasing Jean. Practicing her Spanish with the Martian. Unsuccessfully trying to figure out if Dr. Ackerman is interested in no strings attached.

Connie’s collection of geodes. Sasha’s bad jokes. Stars.

Lots and lots of stars.

“Captain,” comes Sasha’s voice. It’s soft and unassuming – deliberately so. “It’s two thirty in the morning, Earth time. I recommend that you get some sleep. I promise that the helm is in good hands.”

Ymir is stretched out in her pilot’s chair, feet on the console, now clean and sparkling, and eyelids heavier than she realised. Everyone else has retired to the dorms; Eren and Annie had figured out how to use Annie’s security clearance and Eren’s ability to tinker to tap into the ship’s history, and they had pulled up a movie they had watched before they went into cryo. (Star Wars Episode 9, one of Ymir’s personal favourites, even if Jean never relents on telling her the special effects are out-dated and borderline-offensive, and the science is extortionately inaccurate. _Fuck him_ , she thinks. She likes Rey’s battle outfit in that movie. It’s hot.) Connie had complained, insisting that they had only just watched it. Ymir had retorted brazenly with the fact that his _only just_ was technically almost eight years ago. 

It had been nice – or as nice as IASA-brand chicken korma can be when it comes out of a vacuum-sealed packet – to spend time with her crew. She had bullied Jean into retrieving the bottle of moonshine – brewed actually _on the Moon_ , as it were – that she knows he keeps under their flight console, and she’d plied Armin with his first legal drink, and they’d all laughed, and all reminisced sloppily over the dreams they’d had in cryo.

Nice. Alone, but not lonely.

“You don’t have hands, Sash,” Ymir remarks sleepily, rolling her shoulders until they click. “But great use of the idiom. ‘S good.”

“Thanks, Captain. I’ve been practicing.”

“You gonna be alright if I hit the hay? You’d think I’d be sick of sleeping, but –” She yawns mid-sentence as she drags herself to her feet. “Well. Nah.”

“I’ll be fine, Captain. Loneliness is not something I am programmed to mimic.”

Ymir smiles ruefully.

“You’re living the dream, Sash.”

 

* * *

 

Stardate: _82153.13, 2570 days since Mars departure_

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER ADDRESSING CAMERA, PROVIDENTIA BRIDGE]

[TRANSCRIPT] _Captain’s Log: Dr Springer has finally stopped playing David Bowie. It may or may not have something to do with me asking Flight Engineer Yaeger to accidentally spill his salt-supplements on Dr. Springer’s personal laptop. It only lasted so long because Dr. Bodt made the mistake of admitting he did not know who David Bowie was, leading Dr. Springer to take it upon himself to educate Dr. Bodt on the subject of  two - hundred year old pop music. I did not sign up for this, NASA, you hear me?_

_Arlert continues to work through the electrical storm damage we suffered to our transmission beacon when passing Proxima Centuari. He says that the system isn’t broken, but there’s a lot of interference still hanging around, especially in radar data. Flight Engineer Yaeger is currently trying to fix the problem. I have a wager on whether he can get it fixed in a week. I hope to make twenty credits from it._

_Trajectory to Janus II remains steady, and we are on course to enter local orbit in twenty three days. Got a trajectory shift coming up, so should be able to see the black hole for the first time later today. The orbit of Janus II means it will be out of sight for a while longer yet, but it’ll be nice to finally see where we’ve been heading._

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER STARES INTO CAMERA IN SILENCE FOR SOME MOMENTS BEFORE ENDING TRANSMISSION]

 

* * *

 

It’s rare that Ymir dreams. Maybe it’s because she’s forgotten how, or maybe it’s her body’s way of punishing her for spending so many months on end in cryogenic stasis.

She’s probably jealous of Eren’s endless dreams of galaxy plundering, or of that little device Jean hooks over his ear when he goes to bed, which lets him hear white noise – rain, waves, wind – whilst he sleeps, or even of the data stream that flows through Sasha’s mainframe, even when she’s in hibernation. Because that’s a type of dream, right?

She thinks she used to dream when she lived on Earth. About escaping, mainly. About fleeing the heat and the aridity and the acidic taste that just a lungful of outside air would leave in her mouth. She dreamt of stars, before she was amongst them. She dreamt of flying far enough away that things would matter so little that they would begin to make sense. She dreamt of floating.

She’s never dreamt of colours, or of songs, or of ambition – all the things that happen when you have enough time to waste on living, rather than just surviving.

Dreams are an old Earth thing. Dreams were what made movies and music and art – all the stuff that she now has to cart around in rusting, metal boxes as peace offerings. Dreams were hoping for a nice house, for a nice job, for a nice family. Dreams were what NASA had in 1969, and man landed on the moon for the very first time. That seems so ridiculous, now. To think there was a time when humans weren’t hopping from star to star.

She doesn’t dream. Now, there’s just necessity.

Her sleep is light when she’s woken by a prod to her shoulder. She’s dizzy and disoriented for a moment, fuzzy shapes and a mangle of pale colours and blue light, and Eren’s faded silhouette leaning over her, an unapologetic grin upon his face. She regrets not fighting harder for top bunk. She gets little privacy.

“Mmrph, fuck,” she grumbles, blearily fumbling for her pillow so that she might pull it over her face. Someone has turned the lights on in the dorm, and they’re bright and merciless. “Wha’ time is it?”

“Now that’s a question,” Eren chirps. Ymir squints; her left eye is watering, but she takes in the smear of grease across Eren’s cheek, and the ruffled mess of his dark hair. He’s been working. “Probably about half four, Earth time. Here time – your guess is as good as mine.”

“Morning or afternoon, Earth time?” she grumbles wearily, wriggling herself up into a sitting position and rubbing her eyes with her fists. Jean’s bunk, across the way from hers, is empty, his bedding unmade. The bunk above – Marco’s – is empty too. “Where’s everybody?”

“Afternoon,” Eren smirks, “They’re up – y’know – doing their jobs. But actually – we’re just about to come up to first view of the black hole. Thought you’d wanna see.”

“Sasha was meant to set an alarm,” she gripes, swinging her legs over the side of the bunk.

“She’s been playing chess with Connie most of the day. I guess she forgot.”

Ymir quirks an eyebrow, unimpressed.

“Some auxiliary she is. I’m gonna take her back to the store when we get back to habited space,” she says. “Not that Springer would let me.”

“When do we break it to Connie that humans and robots can’t marry?” Eren sniggers, “I feel there’s probably some interplanetary bylaws being broken here with how much time he spends with the A.I.”

“A Republican’s worst nightmare,” Ymir agrees.

“What’s a Republican?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

 

* * *

 

The solar deck is Ymir’s third favourite place on the Providentia, after first, her bed, and then, the bridge, when it’s just her and Jean and easy companionship.

She and Jean spent way too many nights drinking upon the solar deck when she first acquired the ship, in full view of the stars they chased just because they could – and many mornings waking up with cricks in their backs on the hard floor, and supernovae hangovers made all the worse by watching suns burn through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

It’s been a long time since they’ve done that – literally, and figuratively. The crew got bigger, and the jobs got longer, and somehow she found herself with shoulders of responsibility she never really asked for. She kinda misses it. The spontaneity of picking a planet and just hurtling, if only to watch the dawn rise over a world that’s only known by numbers.

Almost all of the crew are already on the solar deck by the time Ymir and Eren get there – Armin and Annie are missing, but Ymir supposes the view will be fine from just about anywhere on the ship, and she’s still too tired to process more than just shuffling along like a zombie.

The shields are low – she knows, because the stars seem just a little brighter, and Connie has his sunglasses resting on his forehead. She knows she should scold them for it – more than 20% opacity could permanently damage their retinae – but there’s something about looking into the surface of a sun, into the shadow of some faraway planet, into the heart of a dying star that’s just a little invigorating.

Almost as much as it is terrifying.

“Captain! You’re here!” Connie lauds, knocking his shades down onto his nose and grinning broadly. “You ready for the show?”

“As much as I can be when I’m looking into the heart of something that could probably kill me – yeah,” she retorts dryly, waddling over to the single bench positioned in the centre of the room, and shoving Jean on the shoulder to budge up against Marco and Mikasa.

“Buzz kill,” Connie pouts, “Hey, Sasha, babe, can you up the opacity a lil’ bit more?”

“Opacity is already at 21%. Any higher could result in permanent optical damage,” Sasha replies, “But for you, I’ll see what I can do. My calculations suggest that ten minutes at this opacity should be refutable.”

Ymir glances over her shoulder to see Eren giving her an I-told-you-so look with a tilt of his head, and she scoffs lightly to herself.

The Providentia groans then – hulking metal rolling over and the foot of aluminium protecting them from the void creaking wearily. Marco looks up, throwing a concerned glance at Jean, who just shrugs.

Ymir feels metal shifting beneath her feet – not literally, but she feels it. She feels the complaints of her ship like grumbles in her own stomach. It’s nothing to worry about; it’s the ship changing course.

It’s not the reason she feels uneasy, no.

No, that’s the thought of hanging on the edge of an abyss that swallows up time and space like a hungry God, and which cares naught about the scientists and sailors who exist only in three dimensions, who become consumed by the theories that mean nothing to the void, and who are so simple and primitive that it is no more than a great, cosmic arrogance that they might try and make sense of this universe that has been kind enough to grant them life.

Ymir feels conceited straddling the edge of the vast demise of the universe; like she’s boasting something she lays no claim to, balancing on the precipice of a cliff that crumbles into a tomb with no walls. She feels that arrogance prickle at her skin and she recognises it.

God, she hates black holes. Mostly, because she can never look away.

Bright light wraps around the far side of the solar deck window; white at first, and then pale yellow – a colour Ymir has always found exists only in the deep reaches of space. It’s not the hue per say – everyone’s seen yellow before – but it’s something like the purity. It’s the only way Ymir can describe it.

It’s light like you’ve never seen light before. It’s not sunlight, not moonlight. Not light from a lamp or a fiercely burning candle. Not like bioluminescence or the flash of a lithium firework.

Dying light has a lucidity like nothing else.

The ship continues to turn.

And she sees it – they all see it, the black hole, the lens in time and space, distorting the blanket of stars around them with great, riptide waves of gravity, and there are gasps of wonder, of awe, of terror, or maybe all of that at once and more – in all its mathematically-possible impossibility. Just sitting there, hiding behind the flank of their ship as they tumble through the vacuum, just waiting for them to change their trajectory and allow their hearts to flutter in surprise that the mouth of this here giant was beside them all this time.

Rings of bright light, and gold matter, and dust ripple out from the void – a circle of darkness blacker than black, devoid of stars, of planets, of feelings, of life, and yet struck through with a horizon of scattered stars that seem to grow slower and slower the closer they get to the bridge between gold and the dreams of men, and yet never passing beyond that point and into the dark. An endless stream of cosmos and dismantled nebulae; a cindered planet after the last man, all charcoal and abyss; a whirlpool, a vortex, a hole in space and time that feels so wrong, so impossible, so somehow quiescent and yet passionately furious for reasons she could never understand, so –

“God,” Marco breathes, “It’s beautiful.”

 _Men have walked backwards into Hell at the sight of less_ , Ymir thinks.

“It’s massive,” Jean whispers; he’s on his feet and walking towards the glass without realising. “Fuck. _Fuck._ We’re atoms. We’re nothing.”

_This is where stars die. Of course we’re nothing compared to them._

“I never –” Mikasa exhales; her dark eyes shimmer with the reflection of the bright, white-gold light, creating galaxies behind her consciousness. “I never imagined –”

_This is oblivion. You don’t imagine. You just are._

“Where do you think it goes?” Eren hushes, hands gripping his thighs through his flight overalls fiercely.

“Everywhere,” Ymir says upon a wistful sigh, “And nowhere.”

_These cosmic ironies will kill me yet._

 

* * *

 

Ymir is not sure for how long they sit there; maybe they’re losing parts of their selves to that gravitational pull which drags in stars and dawns and cosmos all the same. Maybe black holes steal consciousness too.

Some part of her wishes that she knew how to give herself to it, body and soul, like a moth to a gaslight. (Would the others understand that, she wonders. Those who’ve grown up all their lives without seeing moths. Would they know that same pull?)

She’s an astronaut; she’s enraptured by that morbid curiosity of letting herself fall through to the other side. Maybe she would be crushed. Maybe she would be reborn. Maybe she would appear far, far away from here.

And yet she still clings onto life just enough that the thought terrifies her beyond retribution. She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t hate her life.

She just longs for more. She’s addicted to that rush of a survival instinct. She wants answers to things that don’t have answers.

There are a lot of reasons why she’s here, and just as many that make her wish that she wasn’t.

It comes with the job. 

“How far away is it, Sash?” Eren asks, breathlessly; his green eyes are wide and simpering and awestruck. “Are we in its orbit?”

“At a distance of twenty seven million miles, the gravitational pull of the event is 2%,” Sasha replies, matter-of-factly. “Objects at this distance are on a convergent path towards the black hole. You are currently experiencing passage of time at a rate 5% faster than that on Earth.”

“Convergent?” Connie barks loudly, “Are you saying we could be sucked in?!”

Jean snorts and Ymir rolls her eyes; Sasha is better at controlling her digression – if it’s even in her programming.

“At this distance, the hyperdrive of the Providentia would have no problem escaping the gravitational pull of the black hole,” she says, “Janus II exists beyond the scope of the gravitational singularity, and so orbits the black hole without falling into it. The position of the destination within its current orbit requires our trajectory to cut through the singularity for a period of thirteen hours.”

“You use the fancy words, but it still doesn’t make me feel any better, Sash,” Connie pouts. With his aviator shades still obscuring his eyes and unbalancing his face, the pucker of his mouth makes him look ridiculous.

“How much closer would we have to be to get trapped by the event horizon?” Ymir interrupts pointedly, talking to the ceiling – or at least where she imagines Sasha’s voice coming from.

“Gravitational pull would have to exceed 5% for the escape to be impossible.”

Only 3% between them and the point of no return. She knows they're fine. She went over the trajectory calculations herself. She knows this mission inside and out – NASA wouldn't let her fly if she didn't. 

And yet that same survival instinct that shoots her up with needles of adrenaline tells her that she's playing with fire.

“Alright,” Ymir says, “Let’s not get that close, then.”

“I am with you on that, Captain.”

The bright light of the horizon casts heavy shadows across the solar deck; their silhouettes are long and ghoulish, stretching out behind them all like capes, stiff upon the floor. Connie’s shadow is the shortest, where he’s pressed up against the window still, and the collapsing starlight bombards his profile, bouncing aureolin from every curve of his sunglasses.

Eren’s shadow fidgets; he’s up against the glass too, and then he’s pacing backwards, running his hands through his hair – as if in bewildered disbelief – before striding back up to the window and staring longer, wider, wilder. He has an air of mania about him.

When Ymir looks over her own shoulder – just for a moment, because she still sees cosmos behind her eyelids when she blinks, and she needs a second, just a second – her own shadow is dark, merging with Jean’s shadow, with Marco’s, with Mikasa’s, with that of the bench they sit upon. She sees floaters in her eyes, wriggling on her peripheral; she can’t make out any shapes or surfaces, stunned and sun-shocked for all of an inordinate moment.

The quiet is shattered by the frazzle of the intercom system.

“Captain?” comes Armin’s voice, a little strained and distorted by white noise. “Are you there?”

“Here,” Ymir says. She feels not sluggish, but languid. As if the very blood in her veins and the sound of her voice is swirling as slowly as the disintegrates of stars into the vortex of the black hole, and she’s caught, floating on that river into perpetual silence. Time itself seems to have slowed. Peace is the wrong word, but she feels calm. Very calm. “What’s up?”

“Uh, can you – there’s something that’s come up on the radars down here, and I – there should be a small planet currently at about twenty degrees from the orientation of the ship. Can you confirm if you can see it?”

“A planet?” Ymir muses, “Wassit called?”

“Unnamed, as far as I can tell,” Armin replies hesitantly, “It’s only got a classification code. No formal name. Can you see it?”

Connie and Eren have their faces and palms pressed to the glass, noses squashed and breath condensing upon the inside of the window, searching hard through the current of fragmented light and spacedust for the silhouette of something planet-like.

The others don’t seem concerned: Mikasa watching with mild curiosity, and Jean caught up in Marco again, murmuring probably-obscene things that Ymir is glad she can’t hear – but Ymir herself is unsettled.

There’s something in Armin’s voice she doesn’t like, and it ties up her insides into unforgiving knots. The feeling itches.

“A-ah! There!” Eren exclaims loudly, causing Ymir to start. “Check it out! Planet, two o’clock. You got it?”

“Yeah, yeah! I see it!” Connie exclaims, “We see it, Armin. It’s a dot, but it’s there.”

“R-right,” Armin says, swallowing thickly. The hairs on the back of Ymir’s neck prickle. “Captain?”

“What?” she says slowly, concretely, knowingly. “What’s the matter?”

Armin swallows again, the intercom fizzes, and there’s silence. Ymir frowns.

“Armin. What’s the matter?”

The others have stopped now, and they’re staring, watching and waiting patiently for an answer. Ymir feels all their eyes on her at once, and it makes her shadow shrink to remember why they do that.

“Armin.”

Silence, deafening. But then Annie’s voice cuts through it like a knife, sharper, and clearer, with more words that Ymir thinks she’s said to any of them in her entire time on board the Providentia.

“Captain,” Annie says firmly, “We’ve picked up a transmission signal. We thought it was left over electrostatic interference from the storm, but it’s not. It’s consistent. It looks like binary code, but different. Pulses of infrared wavelengths. It’s coming from the coordinates of that planet.”

“That’s impossible,” Ymir says stiffly. The others are still looking at her. “Black holes emit electromagnetism all the time. Think of all the heat that thing’s giving off.”

“Radiofrequency, maybe, but – but this is – this is not – this is pinpointed. It goes above and beyond the background infrared – it’s heat signature but not … but not coming from a heat signature,” Armin cuts in, his voice trembling. “I’ve checked and checked again, Captain.”

“Highly concentrated metal could affect transmission data.”

“Not like this, Captain.”

“Well, what about the ship then? What if we're picking up our own signal beacon somehow? Or something out here is amplifying the transmission from someone else. I don't know.”

“Captain, I –” Armin starts, and then fails. “There’s – there’s something down there – on that planet – creating a deliberate electromagnetic signal. I’m sure of it.”

“That’s _not possible_ ,” she repeats forcefully. God, she could call her own bluff for how insincere it sounds upon her own lips.

Ymir gulps. She feels distant from herself – like she’s watching herself from afar, or inhabiting the eyes of a body not under her control.

Jean’s sharp voice quickly takes the reins.

“That’s crazy,” he exclaims sharply, “That thing must be on a collision course with the black hole! Nothing can be living down there! No-one else has been this deep into space! We would know about it if they had.”

“The planet in question currently experiences a 4.8% gravitational pull,” Sasha interjects calmly. “My calculations suggest that it will pass beyond the event horizon within the next ten days.”

“We’ll lose the signal when it does,” Armin murmurs over the comms, “Light emitted from inside the horizon can’t reach the outside observer.”

“Could it be a ship?” Mikasa asks, “Military? We wouldn't know if it was. It would be classified.”

“We use radio transmission,” Annie says, “On all of our craft. No one uses infrared for spaceflight navigation.”

“So what then?” Connie says; his voice wavers. Ymir winces. “Somehow radioactive? If the core of that planet is made of an IR-active metal, it could easily release an interfering signal. I work with stuff like that all the time.” 

“Or space debris,” Eren adds, insistently, “Maybe someone's ship that got broken up and drifted out here, and some part of the computer system is still active. That could be it.”

They're all still looking at Ymir, and she sees them waiting for her to come up with a logical answer – something that will make them all laugh and joke and tell each other “well, of course – what else could it be?”.

She knows her mind is blank; she tries not to let her face be. She steels her expression, clamping her mouth into a tight line as she climbs to her feet.

“Armin, send me up the data to the solar deck,” she says sternly, pressing against a panel in the wall, which clicks, and then ejects a keyboard and a monitor. Her fingers rattle across the keyboard, and then a series of spectral images flash up upon the screen.

She frowns. Each snapshot shows the same pattern of peaks, growing in intensity as the time stamp gets more and more recent. Armin noticed this hours ago. He didn’t say.

She doesn't have to have a degree in interstellar communications to be able to see that it's not some coincidence.

“Is it a distress call?” she asks flatly, pinching her finger and thumb across the screen to zoom in on the spectral baseline.

“No,” Armin says, “Not that I know of. It doesn't match any interplanetary-registered SOS markers. Nor any known spacecraft under NASA or IASA operation. I used Sasha’s mainframe to access blueprint records.”

“Okay,” Ymir says, reasoning to herself aloud more than to anyone else. “So nobody’s in trouble.”

“I tried replying with similar pulses on the same wavelength,” Armin explains, his words running at a mile a minute, “Even if we can’t understand the message, I thought that maybe whatever is –whatever is transmitting might recognise our presence if it’s advanced enough and change its message, but –”

“But nothing,” Ymir supplies quietly.

“But nothing,” Armin concurs. “It's not sentient, or artificial intelligence, but it's not random decay either. It's purposeful. I … I don't know, Captain. I don't know what to try next.”

Ymir turns her gaze back to the shadow of the tiny planet passing across the sea of bright light that stretches out before them like a road that goes on and on and never quite ends; she looks at it, but she doesn’t see it, caught somewhere in the middle distance and nowhere.

The weight in Armin’s silence – in everyone’s silence – is waiting for her to say something. The anticipation gnaws like blight. They’ll have passed into dust and beyond by the time she fathoms what she wants to say – what she could say – when at any moment she expects the comms to beep with the mission director from IASA demanding over the intercom that they rerun the simulation.

They didn’t cover this sort of thing in sim. Maybe good captains are meant to just _know_. Maybe they feel in their blood the logical answer, or what is to be done, or how to only care about the job.

Ymir swallows thickly. Eren is fidgeting; she knows he’s got something to say. She can take a guess at what he’s about to suggest.

Mikasa has her hands squashed between her knees and her head bowed, the curtain of her black hair falling across her face like a shroud. Ymir knows they’re waiting for some sort of leadership.

Jean exchanges a pressing glance with her. She’s aware of what that sort of knowing looks means.

And that’s about as much as she knows.

“Well, what are we fucking waiting for?” Eren barks boldly, leaping away from the window and striding purposefully towards the door. “Let’s get the shuttle ready to go. Suit up and boot up!”

“Suit up and boot up?” Marco squeaks, causing Eren to stop mid-step. “Captain?”

Ymir is not sure how to describe his look: is it pleading? Pleading her to do what, exactly? Is there something she’s meant to be doing?

She has no words to say.

Jean notices. He always does.

“Fuck off, Eren,” he snaps, “Don’t fucking joke.”

“Joke?” Eren retorts, his green eyes burning fiercely as he turns back to face Jean. “The joke is sitting around on our asses here and not doing something! What are we waiting for? There’s something down there, we don’t know what it is, and we have the capability to get there. It’s a no-question.”

“Eren,” Armin frets over the comms, “The Captain hasn’t decided what we should do yet. It might be – we don’t know what we’re looking at here.”

“Well, shouldn't we go down here and check it out? If we don’t know what it is. Isn't that what we're meant to do?”

“What we're meant to do is continue to Janus II as planned,” Jean says sternly, “Fuck this. We have a job to do. People are counting on us back home.”

“But what if it's a life form?” Marco pries, and Ymir shivers with the words everyone was clearly avoiding. “Because it could be, couldn't it? If Janus II could be habitable, why not other planets in the same system?”

“Or some technology that the military might want its hands on,” Annie mutters, “If it's … if it's not NASA.”

“We're not actually thinking about this, right?” Connie demands, “What part of ten days until it's sucked into a black hole did y'all not get?! On the surface, that’s what? Ten _minutes_?!”

“Dr. Springer has a point,” Sasha intervenes, “Risk to crew safety increases six fold should they decide to abandon original trajectory. I am not sure it's in my programming to allow deviation from the mission, Captain.”

“Then I’ll just _unprogram_ you,” Eren snaps, “It's our obligation to go down and take a look, numbskull. We're astronauts. Exploring space is what we _do._ ”

“Is it?” Ymir says.

They’re all staring at her again, and she tries to shrink back, but her back hits the wall and there’s nowhere else she can go. She swallows thickly, and tries to muster whatever shred of captaincy she’s meant to have.

Eren looks scandalised.

“Cap –”

“Is it our obligation?” she says firmly, levelling her crew with a flat stare. “Is it what we do? Do we jeopardise our safety, our ship, and our _mission_ to take a stab in the dark? Jean's right. People are counting on us to make it to Janus II. People back home are dying, and we could solve that, y’know. A new home for the human race, maybe twenty days in that direction.” She gestures vaguely right, watching as awkward gazes get turned to the ground. “Armin says he doesn't know what this is. Nor do I.  Hell, it's probably just some fucking anomaly, or some radioactive rocks, like Connie says, or some bit of 200-year-old Russian kit that drifted out here, got marooned, and we're not meant to know about. It's probably nothing.”

“Captain,” Eren says again more sharply, “You don't actually believe that?”

Ymir shrugs her shoulders defeatedly.

“I dunno. I don't know,” she replies. “I don’t know what we’re meant to do.”

 

* * *

 

For as long as she can remember, Ymir’s known herself to be a coward.

Selfish, cynical, confrontational, but above all, a coward.

She doesn’t tell people. She lets people think that she’s brave, that she’s noble, that she’s made some big sacrifice being such a young captain and venturing off into the deep recesses of space to surrender years of her life for the sake of humanity. She lets people tell her that she’s selfless. That she’s an asset to not just NASA, but the IASA too, that she’s a gift to interstellar flight, that she’s one helluva pilot.

She lets people think that she’s here because she’s a leader who knows what she’s doing and is dedicated to the cause.

She doesn’t let people know that all she’s ever done is run.

She ran away from her family, because she was afraid of having to see the rest of them wither away and die. She ran away from Earth because she couldn’t bear the dust. She ran away from home, because she thought there might be something to quench that unbearable and unanswerable loneliness that tears her up inside, just that little bit further beyond the stars.

And so, she runs away from this. It’s not what she wants. It’s not what she wants to care about. It’s not why she’s here.

But she’s become tangled up in the consequences of so much running, and now there are seven people and one auxiliary and ultimately, a room full of scientists in front of computers monitoring their transmission light years’ away, waiting for her to make a decision that doesn’t involve running.

It’s beyond her realm of expertise.

All she wants is a little peace and quiet, which is damn impossible in a universe ruled by entropy.

But God, she tries. She tries – and sometimes all she can do is lock herself in the bridge, despite Eren clawing at her heels to give him an answer, and Jean’s pleading looks to do what is logical (what’s logical?), and the crew’s silent impatience for a direction, a command, a rationale.

She stands for a while with her back to the bridge door, long after Eren has finished slapping his palm on the glass and shouting through the door, despite knowing she can only hear muffled words. She knows it won’t last – Eren’s probably run off into the guts of the ship to find a way to override the deadlock and open the door – but she allows herself a moment and a breath.

She tries not to think about planets and black holes and transmissions that are indecipherable.

Close her eyes, and think of something else. Anything else.

The sunrise on the lip of a Martian crater.

The vacuous, bulbous silence of cryo.

The normalcy, the domesticity, the _simplicity_ of Jean with a nicotine stick behind his ear, whilst she scolds him about fucking the Martian in the medbay, and Eren laughs, and Marco blushes, and Connie plays out-dated music on the comms system for anyone to hear.

_Anything else._

It’s hard when all she knows is space. It all comes full circle.

She runs, and she ends up back where she started. Too much responsibility on her shoulders, and no way to shed it.

So she must bear it.

“Sasha, bring up the transmission data on a screen,” Ymir instructs, wearily falling into her pilot’s seat. The front of the ship points into dark space; it allows her to fool herself into believing they aren’t parked on the doorstep of some ravenous god for just a moment longer. She feels her eyes burn and her brow feel heavy; in Earth years, she’s technically forty-three, even if her body and mind are half that. Maybe this weariness is some sort of middle age bestowed upon her as a punishment for cheating time. “And do we have thermal imaging on board? Can we access that?”

“I wasn’t programmed with thermal imaging capabilities in auxiliary school, Captain,” comes Sasha’s voice, punctuated and formal and perhaps a little hesitant. She sounds quieter than usual.

“Tone down the snark,” Ymir sighs. She doesn’t want sarcasm from the auxiliary, and she definitely doesn’t want pity. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Snark toned down to 80%, Captain,” Sasha confirms. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“Do we have any IASA files on this planet? What’s its classification code?”

“I’ll bring them up now,” Sasha replies. “The classification code is PL-007 LAPU0648-JD. It’s a bit of a mouthful, if I do say so myself.”

“Atmosphere?”

“Most likely ammonia-based.”

“Surface?”

“Nitrogen-rich topsoil with trace elements of silicon. The core of the planet is predicted to be solid nickel. The planet exhibits no polarity.”

“Habitable?”

“Unlikely. But – but I suppose I should change my records on that matter given our present situation.”

Ymir presses her lips into a taut, thin line. She doesn’t speak immediately, but when she does, her voice is fragile. It doesn’t sound like her. (Whilst at the same time, it sounds far too much like the person she knows she truly is.)

“Do you think there’s something sentient down there?”

“I don’t have enough information to ascertain any degree of probability, Captain. I can’t give you a logical answer.”

“Sure,” Ymir sighs. She slumps down in her seat a little lower, dropping her chin down onto her chest, and runs her hands through her bangs, dragging them limply across her forehead. “Sure. ‘Course. Of course.”

What would happen, she wonders, if she just grabbed the throttle and slammed them into reverse, sending them hurtling back through the stars from whence they came? Could she just give in, and run, and pretend they were never here? That they never saw this?

God, she likes running. Sure, she wishes she didn’t have to, but it’s just so – easy. So easy. They could be gone from here before any of the crew could realise and make it to the bridge. Jean would be with her; Connie would probably have her back. Marco and Armin would sympathise; Mikasa and Annie would understand the necessity.

Necessity. Always necessity.

The necessity to be far, far away from here. She doesn’t want it; she needs it.

Ymir closes her eyes, and there is the black hole again, as it always is behind her eyelids. She recalls that first awe, and remembers how it had disintegrated into fear. She sees Corporal Levi, twenty years older than when they left him, just because they didn’t truly understand the time shift they were baiting. That emptiness is his eyes still haunts her.

She doesn’t want that to happen again. Maybe it’s too late for her – maybe she loses a little bit of herself with each passing light year – but she can still save someone else she cares about begrudgingly from that same downwards slope from awe towards the point of no return.

Humans have been in space almost two hundred years. It’s high time someone branched out into space vagabonding, she reasons.

(If it were only so easy.)

“Captain.” Sasha has always been awfully good at sounding meek. Ymir wonders if it’s something she’s been practicing, in order to break through Ymir’s own frosty facade. Hell, maybe Eren fiddled with her programming because he knows it’s the easiest way to get Ymir to give him what he wants.

“What?”

“Captain, why are you here?”

Ymir opens her eyes, and then blinks slowly. She scowls at nothing in particular.

“What do you mean ‘why am I here?’” she bites. She knows she shouldn’t be taking it out on an auxiliary – even if Sasha claims not to feel human emotion and has never taken offense from Ymir’s snappy remarks in the past – but she’s fried. Sasha probably knows the truth of who she is and where she came from and the death she left behind; Ymir’s bravado is probably foolish in Sasha’s theoretical eyes.

“Because we’re looking for a new Earth,” she continues regardless. “‘Cus we fucking poisoned our old one and are too damn conceited to realise we don’t deserve to claim a new one. ‘Cus I’m the person they knew would take this job into the middle of nowhere for the least amount of money. Damn it.”

There’s a moment of silence that feels deliberate. The ship is still slowly turning, adjusting its course to match the orbit of Janus II, somewhere, twenty-odd days from where they are now. The rings of light caught in the black hole’s vortex creep around the curved windows of the bridge. The light is bright and unforgiving when it strikes her across the face.

Perhaps Sasha knows as much before she speaks again.

“Captain, why are you here?”

_These fucking auxiliaries. Too human for their own damn good._

Sasha definitely knows about her cowardice. Ymir’s not sure if that makes her feel better or not.

“I want to run,” she digresses with a defeated sigh. The words hurt in her throat, too heavy and gallish to sit comfortably upon her tongue without filling up her mouth and make her feel like gagging. It reminds her of choking of CO2; tastes much like the blood that once filled the throats of the people she called family. “To not be _there_. To escape. To fly.”

Sasha doesn’t reply. Ymir continues, and it’s almost painful to admit.

“To know why I matter.”

It’s a God-damn tragedy that the only person she’s ever confessed that to is not even a person. She never told the old, white-tashed guy in her interview for NASA; she never told Commander Smith; she’s never told Jean.

She never even told her father when she left him behind on the surface of a dying planet to suffocate.

She’s told a damn computer.

(She really needs to find some friends.)

“Captain,” Sasha says carefully – if auxiliaries have the capacity for sensitivities such as that. “I don’t feel emotion that is my own. It’s not in my programming. But it seems that you already know what you want to do, and I think you should do it.”

Ymir sighs, teasing a rough hand through her unkempt hair.

“What level is your honesty programming at, at the moment?”

“Full capacity.”

It begs a wry, if humourless, smile upon her lips. It feels derisive and condemnatory.

“Tone that down a little too, would’ya.”

The black hole gloats her through the windows of the bridge, gargantuan and goading and brilliantly aglow, all the way down to the pinprick of red light that seems to exist into obscurity in its very centre, where light and dust and matter shifts out of the visible spectrum.

If there were sound in space, Ymir wonders if the mouth of the abyss would be laughing at her struggle. She wonders if it would bellow, haughty and booming, and chide her for even considering playing with fire.

Has she even seen fire in zero gravity? It’s like waves. Waves upon waves of consuming light – just the sort of thing that would coax an ignorant human bound by that manic obsession with the unknown, towards a point of no return.

And yet.

_And yet._

She knows the abyss wouldn’t laugh. It’s not sentient. It doesn’t pick and choose what or who falls into its gravity. It doesn’t go hoovering across the universe looking for matter to feed an unquenchable hunger.

It just is. It doesn’t care if some lowly human takes a step out onto a planet doomed for dust. It can’t care.

She is insignificant.

Maybe doing this will help humanity, or maybe it won’t.

Maybe it will just help her, in the same way that running would.

“Ymir,” comes Mikasa’s voice over the comms. It’s chilling and severe, but the use of her first name lets Ymir know that it’s caring. “You should know that the comms system is on, again.”

“Is it now,” Ymir deadpans.

“We’re all in the canteen. You should be here.”

Behind her, Ymir hears the metallic clink of the deadbolt on the bridge door being remotely unlocked. Eren’s timing is as good as ever.

Ymir’s decision is not her own, but it has to be one she makes regardless.

“Alright,” she says. “I’m on my way.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Here is my much discussed space lesbians project. If you know me on Tumblr or Twits, then you know I've been working on this since January. I have a lot of this written, but here's just the first chapter for now. I swear to God this will actually get updated. I am very passionate about hard science fiction stories. (Droplets 25 is currently being written too, so don't fret!)
> 
> I love space movies. You can see where I've taken inspiration from Interstellar, Sunshine, The Martian, Event Horizon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Europa Report, Apollo 13, and many others in the writing of this piece. The title is from an Allen Ginsberg quote! However, this piece also acts as part 5 of my Cloud Atlas-inspired series, which I am currently working on. You don't have to read them in order, obviously, because I'm publishing the penultimate part first. It's not relevant to the story on the surface, but there are some details that will be important to the next part of that serial. But don't worry if that just sounds like nonsense now. The story works as a stand-alone. (But psst, take note of the letter reading scene in this chapter. Relevant for part 3, which is a Jeanmarco WW2 piece, but details, details.)
> 
> Anyway. I've tried to make the science approachable and not defining of the story, but I have worked to make everything as accurate as possible. This is the first fic where I've had to consult mathematical equations for accuracy. it's great. I love when science and writing overlap, 'cus I'm a scientist!
> 
> This first chapter is mainly exposition. No space lesbians yet. But, to be fair, I would class this story as much a Yumikuri piece as it is a Ymir & Jean brotp piece, and again as much a Ymir-centric study. Ymir desperately needs more focus. She is absolutely a breath of fresh air to write.
> 
> This fic is dedicated to Becky (goldiealchemy), for her enthusiasm for this project and as a congrats on being done with her A levels.
> 
> Important jargon: NASA/IASA: (Inter)National Aeronautics and Space Administration. ISS: International Space Station. Everything else is does-what-it-says-on-the-tin.
> 
> So, enjoy. Boldly go. May the force be with you. Don't fuck the alien. Please leave a comment!


	2. Canis Minor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We must die striving with ambition.

_Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore._  
― André Gide

 

 

_Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man._  
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

 

 

_A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?_  
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

 

 

* * *

 

 

The lights in the canteen are too bright; it’s the first thing Ymir notices. White, artificial, with none of the lucidity of distant stars. The plastic benches look hard, the walls look sterile, the faces of her team bleak. She is reminded of an interrogation room – and Hell, once upon a time, in a lifetime far, far away, she sat in her fair share of those, dodging curfews and choking for the thrill of it.

 

“What about base?” Marco asks nobly, “Should we let them know? Maybe they’ll have some advice for us if we radio home. Know something about IR signals. Run diagnostics on the ship for us. I don’t know.”

 

Ymir has seen this all before: a room full of people, crowded around a table, huddled in deep and complex conversation, only to stop and stare when she walks in through the door, sits down at the table, pretends to be one of them. The difference is this: she was four the first time, and the adults in their white coats and clipboards said with solemn hearts: _sweetheart, we’re so sorry about your little sister._

 

(It was the same when she was six, and it was brother and mother too, and she learned to tell apart real and fake condolence and real and fake adults. The pity on the faces of the doctors was not real; the blank, mannequin slate of her father was.)

 

This time, she’s twenty-something and forty-something simultaneously, and it’s her crew that are staring at her in expectation, making her feel a child again. She feels blinded by the spotlight she was trained to stand in, unable to meet Eren’s fierce gaze, nor Jean’s derision.

 

_I want you to stop looking at me like that. All of you. Just pretend you never heard._

 

“Can’t,” Armin murmurs, and he’s looking at the table, tracing his finger across the plastic. “There’s no point trying to let them know. Transmission delay is at least ten days. We don’t have time to wait for them to make a decision for us.”

 

“We’re gonna lose contact with CAPCOM if we go down there, and then they’re gonna freak the fuck out, and they’re gonna be on our asses about it when we get back,” Jean adds gravely, “We’re flying blind here. If something goes wrong, we’ll be dead – probably – by the time a call for help even got back to our system, let alone base.”

 

Ymir longs to be that four-year-old again, and hide behind the leg of her mother. She knows Jean knows – and has known, for a really long time – who and what she is, but hearing him take upon the mantle she is meant to carry is not something she can bare. It was better when her cowardice was an unspoken rule between them. When she knew he would cover her ass when it mattered, and not call her out amongst the crew for what they all overheard anyway.

 

She feels them all looking at her again, in some way or another, waiting for her to offer something, _anything_ to the table. They’re judging her by the stripes on her shoulder. She knows it.

 

_I want to run_ , she thinks. _Prove them right,_ goads the voice inside her head. _Go on._

 

She shifts on her seat, the blue-plastic stool of the canteen table hard and uncomfortable with only the thin layer of her flight suit between her and it.

 

She can’t appear weak. It’s probably too late, but –

 

She can’t appear weak. The weak die. The weak get uprooted, usurped, cast away by the people who sit at desks and make executive decisions from a million miles away. The weak cough up their lungs before twenty-five and remain satisfied with a ground that tries to kill them.

 

She glances back over her shoulder and thinks about returning to the bridge, locking herself away for long enough that her decision won’t even matter once she emerges again. She could stick her head in the sand, wait for the planet and the mystery to pass into oblivion. Maybe she’d get court martialled for it, but maybe she wouldn’t – she can’t know which just yet –

 

God. It’s selfish, isn’t it?

 

There are eight of them around this table, and she can still only think about one. Far too small for the too big universe and all its grand possibilities. It’s always been the case.

 

“Ymir,” Jean starts, knowing. He always knows. It sounds like a warning; she almost wonders if he would lunge across the table to grab her wrist or shake her into sense. She can’t hear it, not today, whichever day that might be, in this time and place where days are meaningless.

 

She knows, dammit. She knows, she knows. She wishes she didn’t; she wishes she really was that damn clueless, but–

 

“There’s time shift to consider,” she says, because what else can she do? Nothing. She might as well pretend to be a someone. A someone is better than the no-one Jean knows she is, and knows wears her rank like a shackle. A someone has a greater purpose in the galaxy than a no-one. “Whatever the fuck is down on this planet is caught deeper within the gravitational pull than we are now. It’s not gonna be like Janus II where we lose a few hours here or there. We’d lose days by making a detour. Maybe longer. Relativity’s not gonna be the same down there as it is up here.”

 

“One hour of surface time will equate to approximately 15 days of Earth time,” Sasha supplies diligently. Across the table, Ymir watches Armin pale; she hopes her face doesn’t do something similar.

 

The singularity event pales in comparison to the depths of the black hole she stared into long ago, when she was just a junior command pilot and Commander Erwin Smith bore the brunt of the responsibility she bares now, and the bridge of the Cassiopeia was just a stepping stone to great adventure. They lost decades in the space of three hours. Maybe this time they’ll only lose a few days. It’s not much. It’s barely a blip in the great course of everything. They’ll be off radar from CAPCOM for little more than a week.

 

All for thirty nine minutes and thirty six seconds of surface time. That’s what their ten day window will equate to.

 

“There you have it,” Ymir says plainly, splaying her palm flat on the table. She thinks of Commander Smith, decommissioned now for what those lost years on the Cassiopeia took from him. She doesn’t want those same regrets. “We would lose a lot of time by going down there. That’s why … that’s why it has to be everyone. Everyone has to agree that this is – that this is what we should do. Everyone has to go down to the surface. I’m not leaving anyone behind on this ship. It’s everyone, or it’s no-one. That’s the deal.”

 

She knows she sounds wearier than all the years she might lay claim to, here and there. What strength she left in the shadow of gaping giants, she cannot say, but she feels its absence now.

 

_Everyone. Not just me. If it’s everyone, it’s not my fault. Not my responsibility. Not my choice alone._

 

“So, we should take a vote,” Mikasa suggests, pursing her lips. It’s hard to get a read on how she’s feeling about the situation. “Unanimous or nothing.”

 

“Well, I’m saying yes,” Eren cuts in bluntly, folding his arms across his chest. He still has that damned grease stain swiped across his cheek. “And I’m also saying we’re wasting what little damn time we have by sitting around chatting.”

 

“I vote yes as well,” Marco says, defiantly, pressing his mouth into a fierce, flat line. “Even if it sounds like the stupidest idea ever to grace the history of space travel – it’s … it’s the right thing to do. It’s why we’re here. I’m with Eren. Even if – even if it goes –”

 

“It won’t,” Eren replies harshly, answering the unanswered question that has everyone else grimacing. He looks to the others. “Miks? Connie? Armin?”

 

“I agree with Eren,” Mikasa supplies solemnly, whilst Armin stares at the table, a quiver in his jaw. Connie’s eyes are boring into his own feet; he grits his teeth, fingers clenched at his sides. Annie stares at the ceiling. “We’re scientists. We investigate the unknown. It’s what we do. What we’ve always done. You said it yourself, Captain. We want to know _why we matter_.”

 

Ymir cannot hold her gaze any longer; she looks to the floor, quickly all shades of embarrassed for reasons she can’t quite justify. Her face contorts into a wobbly frown.

 

“Even if you don’t,” Annie interjects dryly, her voice a swift monotone. “If it’s Russian equipment down there, the military will want it. It’s been two hundred years, and they still don’t grasp the concept of the _international_ in IASA. They will gladly jeopardise a humanitarian mission for the prospect of classified technology. I’m required to insist that we go down. My vote is yes.”

 

“I want to know what’s down there,” Armin adds quietly, “Technology or – or otherwise. You … you didn’t bring me aboard to be dead weight, Captain. It seems – maybe it’s not logical, but it seems worth the risk.”

 

“I don’t want to die,” Connie says at last, and a shiver runs down Ymir’s spine. “I don’t want to die, but – but, fuck. I trust you guys. It’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever fucking heard, but I trust you guys. Black holes don’t scare me.”

 

Finally, all eyes fall on Jean, who has remained uncharacteristically tight-lipped. He has his arms folded across his chest, obscuring the NASA logo that sits over his breast. No-one says anything – not aloud, at least. Eren vibrates like he wants to, like he’s having trouble containing all the reasons why it’s nonsensical to him if they _don’t_ go, like he might boil and burst with the way a hiss of _Kirschtein, c’mon_ exists pre-emptively upon the snarl in his lips.

 

Jean doesn’t look at him. His eyes drift to Marco, who sits wide-eyed and pretty and patient, and then to Mikasa, sombre and unreadable, and finally to Ymir. There’s a one-way conversation between them, where Jean clearly reads what she isn’t saying. The Providentia groans in the silence.

 

“I want,” Jean says very slowly, watching Eren lean forward in anticipation. Ymir recognises this voice: it’s Jean’s pulling-rank voice. He doesn’t use it very often – only when he wants to antagonise Eren or dictate their choice of in-flight movie. “The Captain and I want,” he corrects himself, very plainly. He stares hard at Eren. “A detailed risk assessment _now_. I want the math. I want the calculations. I want to know how long our time window is, down to the millisecond. I want everything we know about this planet: its biosphere, its atmospheric pressure, its gravity, its favourite fucking colour. I want to know exactly how much fuel this is gonna cost us, how much time we’re gonna waste, and how long we have to make this work. Now. _Stat_. Do we have an understanding?”

 

In the split second of blind silence that follows, alit with frank surprise, Ymir can’t help but wonder why it was ever her primed for leadership. She knows that almost none of those questions were readable upon her face, and yet Jean pulled them all out of his ass without blinking.

 

He’s a real Captain. He’s a leader, an explorer, a saviour. She’s a damn pirate.

 

“Affirmative,” comes Sasha’s response overhead. Everyone leaps to their feet. Ymir remains seated.

 

She swallows, and feels guilty.

 

* * *

 

 

“Cap!” comes Eren’s voice, ricocheting like a bull in a china shop through the hollows of the ship. “Cap, you here?!”

 

“Here,” Ymir replies, tugging her head through the neck hole of her thermals. The jersey cotton feels too soft against her skin; she’s used to something harsher, something scratchier.

 

Eren wheels ‘round the corner into the dorms too fast, almost catching himself on the deadbolt. He’s already in his IVA suit, orange and garish and bloated. In his hands is a HoloTab, which he thrusts out into Ymir’s unready hands.

 

“Calculations,” he announces with fierce determination, peering over her shoulder and invading her space. “Triple checked. Our window’s gonna be 25 minutes of surface time, allowing for 7 minutes each way on entry and exit.  Angle of incidence will be 12.6 degrees.”

 

Ymir flicks through the data with her thumb, forcing her eyes to see something more than numbers. She can’t just see gibberish at a time like this.

 

“Atmospheric pressure?”

 

“About 25 kilopascals. About a quarter of Earth, and about the same as Janus II. I’ve adjusted fuel allowance on the shuttle in accordance for getting out of the atmosphere. I’ve siphoned over enough for us to make the trip three times if we wanted – which I doubt is the case, but – we have enough.”

 

“Fine,” Ymir says, “What about the rover? We can’t take it. We’ll have to go _ad quod damnum_. EVA suits?”

 

“Connie’s sorting them. And the SAV will be fine. It’s ready and waiting, I made sure of it.”

 

“Comms?”

 

“Checked and operational. Sasha’s programming is functional inside the shuttle. We’re not flying blind.”

 

“Did you get Armin to patch across the transmission data from the planet?”

 

“Yep. And Annie’s already looked at nav. Y’know how she is. Looks at it once, and she’s got it.” Eren taps his temple for emphasis. Ymir gets the impression that he’s humouring her questions.

 

“Dead weight?”

 

“The Martian was chatting shit about bringing along his kit, but Kirschtein looked ready to rip him a new one.”

 

“ _Hmph_ ,” Ymir muses, handing Eren back the HoloTab so that she can finish dressing. “That _is_ a new one.”

 

Eren flattens the line of his mouth; if he has something snarky to say about Jean being tightly wound enough to snap at Marco, he manages to retain it against his general lack of judgement. Instead, he huffs a heavy breath.

 

“You’re doing the right thing, Cap. Everything checks out. It’s good. We’re good. We don’t have the time to – to freak out. _Literally_. We gotta jump in 12 minutes or we miss the best angle of approach.”

 

“I’m not freaking out,” Ymir says derisively. She rolls up the sleeves of her undershirt, even though she’s been told time and time again not to have bare arms beneath her IVA. “Does this look like my freaking out face?”

 

“I dunno,” Eren says with a frown as he squints at her. “Never seen your freaking out face. Is it different from your I-hate-the-world-and-want-to-kill-my-crew face? I always thought they were gonna be similar.”

 

Ymir doesn’t hesitate to smack him on the arm, and he barks a laugh that she can’t help but feels is devoid of humour.

 

“I’m gonna put you up for fucking parole when we get back,” she hisses, “Pain in my fucking backside. Shoulda hired that Thomas kid. He’d know how to stick to a damn mission.”

 

They jog to the shuttle airlock, the carabiners clipped to Eren’s suit jingling against his thighs as they run. Ymir knows her stomach is in turmoil, but she hasn’t the time to feel nauseous. Eren was right. Eren _is_ right. She doesn’t doubt her trust in _him_. She wanted someone else to make the decision, after all.

 

Everyone is already there, suited and booted and _orange_. Ymir sees her own IVA hung up, still, in the wall-compartment; her eyes immediately rest heavy on the tabs on the shoulders and the title on the chest.

 

_Commanding Officer_.

 

It’s not like she doesn’t know who she’s meant to be. Why does it even matter when they’re so far out in space? No-one’s really going to care about her pay grade out here.

 

She drags her feet over to the suit and pulls it from its clips with a heavy sigh that she tries not to let stagnate. The others don’t seem to notice.

 

Jean looks fried – or that he’s ready to fry everyone else. His hair is a mess, run-through with too many frantic fingers from forehead to scalp, and he’s chewing angrily on a Twizzler again. His tawny-coloured eyes are ignited beneath the harsh, artificial glare of the chamber as he watches Marco and Connie check each other over in their IVA suits, whilst Armin and Annie pour over a monitor in the wall, whispering in hushed tones.

 

Eren scoops up a pack from the floor, slinging it over his shoulder with bouldering gracelessness, and disappears through the open door of the airlock into the shuttle command module. It already looks like it’s going to be a cosy fit inside, and there are still seven of them left to pile in. Ymir’s never liked flying coach. Even the Prov feels crowded these days, compared to when it was just her and Jean joyriding across the galaxy.

 

She’s halfway into her IVA when Mikasa rests a hand on her shoulder from behind.

 

“Captain,” she says, all formality and severity, “Are you scared?”

 

“Scared?” Ymir says, “No.”

 

“You could stop this. Tell them no. If you really want to run.”

 

“I should really stop leaving comms on in the bridge, huh?” Ymir snarks, glancing back at Mikasa over her shoulder. “Soon the whole crew’s gonna know my secrets.”

 

Mikasa withdraws her hand; it's all very clinical. They've been colleagues for years now, and despite everything, they don't know each other well enough for it to be anything but. Ymir knows it's down to her.

 

“Not much time for secrets in deep space,” Mikasa remarks, and Ymir almost scoffs for how far from the truth it is. She might not have any secrets left to spill, but she doubts the others can possibly know who she is when she barely has a handle on it herself. “Nowhere to hide them.”

 

Ymir exhales heavily through her nose and faces forward, clenching her jaw.

 

“Thanks for the pep talk, doc. Think you could zip me in?”

 

* * *

 

 

“Automatic detachment sequence commenced. Activate main engine burn-off system.”

 

“Activated. Crew members please confirm visors are closed and locked.”

 

“Affirmative.”

 

“Yep.”

 

“Locked and loaded, Cap.”

 

Ymir’s breath condenses warm and muggy on the inside of her own helmet, fogging up the purple-tinted glass around her mouth. Her finger hovers with the weight of a pendulum over a flashing green button on her console; from the corner of her eye, she watches Jean’s dexterous fingers flick along a line of switches, knocking them all upright. They’ve done this together a million times before, but there’s sweat on both their brows.

 

She tries to imagine Eren, strapped into the racer-seat behind her, and wonders how to emulate his fearlessness.

 

“Airlock decoupling in five, four, thr–” comes Armin’s voice, somewhere to her right.

 

“What’s our projection angle?” she asks quickly.

 

“Twelve and a half percent, and rising - you ready, Cap?” Jean replies with practiced ease, eyes not leaving the console as he watches the gyroscope fluctuate about its median.

 

“Ready. You engaged on the EMP thruster?”

 

“Yep. Ready to fire main engines.”

 

“Two, one – airlock decoupled. We are in free float. Please engage, Captain.”

 

“Jean, activate fuel cells.”

 

“Roger that.”

 

There’s a moment of silence, and weightlessness pervades the entire command module, enrapturing Ymir in the knowledge that they are untethered from the Providentia, and drifting in free space. If the engines didn’t light, they would float, float and be caught up in the riptide of the vortex on their doorstep, spinning onwards into an infinity of no making. Powerlessness entangles its sweaty fingers with her own; her eyes flit to Jean’s hands as he stabs his index finger down on the button before him.

 

“EMP drive ignited. Raise thrusters to–”

 

“Eighty seven percent,” Eren supplies at rapid fire, and Jean nods. Behind him, Armin presses frantically on the tablet screen in front of him.

 

The shuttle croaks, and then it roars, some great burst of electromagnetic energy exploding from their taillight in what must be a poor sight to behold, devoid of the fire and flames and rocket boosters that had men of the past awing and ah-ing.

 

But the rush in her ears is deafening; the growl of a mechanical beast rearing its clanking head to bellow as she’s thrown back in her seat by the force of the propulsion that flings them away from the starboard of the ship. Jean clenches his fingers around the console joystick, knuckles white, base of his skull flush against his headrest. Somewhere behind, both Marco and Connie wince.

 

And God, it’s terrifying – because Ymir raises her eyes to the window, and they’re hurtling towards some great, gaping mouth, framed in gold teeth and vocal with a lashing tongue of light that disappears into a tiny red prick in the centre of it all. The black hole unhinges its jaws, and she’s sure – she’s absolutely sure it’s going to swallow them whole.

 

She can’t look. She can’t fucking look. She twists her head to the side and buries her face as best she can in her helmet, into the crook of her shoulder. Lights on the console flash like Christmas lights, lit up in red and green, blinking incessantly as the walls around them shake. She takes no solace in knowing that two hundred years of human space exploration have left her, still, in little more than a glorified tin can as she goes hurtling off towards the very definition of unknown.

 

Her shoulders strain against the straps that lash her to her seat, cutting into her skin even through the thick Nomex of her IVA, as her body wills itself to float upwards. Gravity disappears into the night, along with the spinning of the Providentia laid to anchor. She tries to keep her feet – bulky and clumsy as they are in her suit – pressed firmly to the floor of the command module, but her calves burn. Jean says it's a rush – and maybe it is, that feeling of trying to keep yourself from being pulled apart by the whoosh of nothing that hurtles past and tries to strip you of your skin from your bones in its acceleration – but not this time. She locks down all the muscles in her body.

 

“Six minutes and twenty seconds,” Eren says from over her shoulder, his voice reverberating with the rumble of the roof. “Entering the atmosphere of PL-007 in forty five seconds. Prepare to engage deceleration of magnetic field.”

 

The shadow of the dwarf planet looms up before them too quick and too sudden, expanding larger and larger as kilometres tumble away behind them like footsteps in the dust. Gold light emanating from the heart of the gargantua clings to the planet’s edges as cosmic storms, but its face is dark, black, but not the blackest black Ymir has seen tonight. There’s still something solid, something tangible about the shadow that rises before them a wave, and not a ghost. She thinks she can make out terraforms; shapes in the earth; the fissures of mountains against the dark.

 

And in the space between chaos and shadow, there is something else; something invisible and goading, something mocking her foolishness in playing with physics she just doesn’t understand. There is something sentient, something that goes beyond her own consciousness, beyond the lives of eight people in a space shuttle, beyond the quiet, greedy magnitude of the black hole. There is some Lovecraftian laughter in the air, and in the airless air, that she knows she’s the only one to hear. It sounds like secrets.

 

“Entering the atmosphere,” Jean commands, flicking more switches with effortless fluency in his hands. The shutters begin to ease down over the windscreen, painfully slowly. The last glimpses of gold, high above the atmosphere of this far away world are extinguished, replaced by sparks of flashing light across the console, illuminating the dark. Claustrophobia chuckles upon Ymir’s shoulder; tells her that her starless coffin will be aluminium and polycarbonate. “It’s about to get a li’l hot in here, guys.”

 

* * *

 

 

“EMP at two percent and standing.”

 

“Alright, alright, easy does it. Drop to half.”

 

“EMP at one percent. Stabilising. Two metres from surface.”

 

“Roger. Let’s ease her down.”

 

“Landing gear calibrated to surface topography. Ready for impact, please.”

 

Ymir braces her feet flat upon the aluminium floor of the shuttle, knees apart, calves rigid. She presses both palms flush against the hard plastic of the control panel, but torsion tries to fling her back against her chair. She keeps her gaze fixed pointedly on the monitors before her, the terrain of the planet mapped out in numbers and figures and red lines. The surface-access shuttles are her least favourite: no windows for landing. Apparently windows are a distraction. Numbers don’t lie. It’s easier to fly by numbers. That’s what she knows. 

 

The nagging thought at the back of her mind is that when she sees the stars again, from the portholes in the hull, or from the window of the airlock, or from the steps of the SAV, the black hole will have somehow crept closer behind her back, in some cruel game of grandmother’s footsteps, a wicked grin somehow twisting its gaping mouth as it gobbles up the cosmos.

 

Ymir wishes they’d taken the rover. It’s old-school. It only fits five of them, but it has windows in the command module that they don’t close for landing. She would have had to leave some of the crew behind on the Prov, but she would’ve been able to _see_.

 

She looks to Jean in the neon-lit dark, his tongue poking out between his lips in concentration, eyes trained on the artificial horizon, watching the needle tip back and forth over the line. He has one hand clamped around the joystick, the other rattling across switches to his right; he’s too good at this. Ymir’s a good pilot. Hell, she’s a great pilot. One of the best of her generation, that’s why Commander Smith picked her, all those years ago.

 

But Jean is a prodigy. Jean is a pilot of the here and the now, which has never been something Ymir has dwelled in, too often chasing distant stars and fleeing distant memories.

 

Jean needs no windows to fly. He has a job to do, so he does it. Ymir is jealous. It’s an ugly feeling. She’s used to it.

 

_You have an ugly personality._ He said something like that once.

 

The shuttle rattles, vibrations shivering through the hub of the SAV, up into the command module. The EMP thrusters hum and sigh, the titanium legs of the landing gear making contact with the ground. Her seat shakes a little, but she barely feels it.

 

One small step for man, right? Dread seems to settle in her bones, and perhaps the scariest feeling is not knowing why it does. Her first breath on the surface of the new planet dangles over an invisible precipice.

 

“Flawless,” Jean grins, releasing his hands from the joystick and slapping the control panel with a palm, easy. He grins like he’s just run a perfect programme back on the Lunar sim; he forgets himself, pleased by his smooth landing. His eyes twinkle with something boyish and unimpeded by the tax of great adventure. “Couldn’t have done that better myself.”

 

“Alright, Captain Cocksure,” Eren barks, unbuckling himself from his seat behind Ymir. “Y’can get your head out of your ass now.”

 

“You want me to have another go, Yaeger?” Jean snaps, “‘Cus if you wanna lose your lunch, I can arrange that–”

 

“How about we stop bickering and get on with it,” Connie remarks with a frown. “I ain’t getting any younger. Literally. I am _literally_ getting older by weeks the more you two fight.”

 

* * *

 

 

Ymir stands on the steps of the shuttle looking out over a weeping, blue-green horizon. It bleeds like a water-colour painting in those textbooks of old, with smudges of colour that look like the sea she barely remembers. Dying starlight scatters through the ammonia clouds that hang low above the planet surface as rolling waves, painting the pale-blue sky in streaks of red, and yellow, and brown, something sulphurous or phosphorous, Ymir reckons. Even in the bulk of her EVA suit, her legs feels light; the atmosphere is thin, anhydrous ammonia, devoid of any vapour that might react with labile hydrogen to form a heavier fog around her feet.

 

Her breaths are still laboured enough. She’s acutely aware of each rise and fall of her chest, each puff of CO2-saturated air misting up the glass of her visor, each twinge in her ribs where her breasts compress against the lining of her suit done-up too tight.

 

The surface of the planet in sparse and barren, crags of blackish rock and waves of grey sand-turned-stone over the course of passing millennia. Dust whips razor-sharp around the titanium stilts of the shuttle, clipping against Ymir’s calves like greedy hands trying to trip her up; the wind carves haggard paths in the landscape, excavating the nitrate-rich topsoil to the dark-brown bone.

 

The snowmen-like figures of Annie, Connie, and Marco plod through the crags and the crevices almost comically, their limbs over-sized and clumsy, their white suits rounding out their stomachs and their legs into bulbous spheres, pumped taught with O2-rich air from the tanks on their backs. Stark mountains rise in the distance behind them, and beyond, consuming the grey peaks and the sky above, the black hole stretches out, gold and black and foreboding.

 

Ymir shudders, watching her three crewmates take willing steps towards the horizon it consumes. The chill down her back is self-inflicted.

 

“Captain,” comes Mikasa’s voice over the comms bud lodged inside Ymir’s ear, “Your blood pressure is rising. Are you okay?”

 

“‘M fine,” Ymir retorts gruffly. She lifts her foot, lighter than she’s used to, and staggers down the three steps from the shuttle door, watching the footprints of her crew disappear into the scattering topsoil. “Where do I need to walk, Armin?”

 

“I - I can’t pinpoint the signal exactly, but,” Armin splutters across the comms. “But it hasn’t changed at all since I first intercepted it. It’s coming from within a hundred-metre radius of the shuttle.”

 

“Can you see anything, Cap?” Eren pipes up, loud enough for Ymir to flinch.

 

“Besides the little green man, standing ‘bout ten feet in front of me, giving me a li’l wave? No.”

 

“Fuck you.”

 

Ymir glances around, her neck stiff with the weight of her helmet. The planet is desolate, devoid of signs of plant, water, life. It’s little more than a grey and rocky desert; a purgatory; a graveyard. She sees nothing, not even the remnants of some crashed space craft, not even the shards of space debris washed up from across the galaxy. It’s not a planet that Earth of two hundred years ago would write stories and make movies about. It’s a world unbearably lonely.

 

“This is stupid,” she growls to herself, but knowing she shares a consciousness when plugged into her suit like this, wired to seven other bodies by radio transmission. She grimaces. “Sorry, Eren, but we gotta leave. We’re wasting resources. There’s nothing here. That’s my decision–”

 

She hears Eren suck in a sharp breath on the other end of the comms line, ready to plead the fifth, maybe even come marching out of the SAV to give her an ear-full, before Marco shouts.

 

“Captain, come quick!”

 

Ymir’s head whips up as, ahead of her by some fifty feet, Marco, Annie, and Connie crowd around the geoinfrasensor in Connie’s hands, some ancient, dated piece of equipment Connie had in his personal effects, passed down from a professor to a professor to Dr. Connor Springer, who would just so happen to arrive on a planet in a time where needing to read IR would be necessary. Murphy’s Law is, as ever, her own, personal God. One day, she will eat that God, she swears. Swallow it up and chew it into fine, bloody pieces, so that she might no longer be tormented by: _if it can happen, it will_.

 

“What?” Ymir yaps, jogging as best she can across the shifting sands towards them, bouncing high with each step in the low gravity. _Please God, be kind to me_ , she thinks, she prays. That nagging feeling in her head tells her primly that praying is such an old Earth thing to do. No-one prays any more. Jean wouldn’t pray when he lands a shuttle. “What is it?”

 

“IR spike, right here,” Connie says, tapping the GIS with a stubby finger, as Marco drops to his knees in the dirt, digging through the pouches of his EVA suit for the tools he was told by Jean not to bring. He retrieves a fold-up trowel and a pair of coarse-bristled brushes, which he hands to Annie as she joins him on the ground. It’s all very old-school. “I think there’s something buried.”

 

Ymir reaches him, extending her gloved-hand to demand the GIS. The screen flashes red with a steady pattern of pulsing spikes and incessant beeps, each feeling much like a flick to the temple.

 

The soil beneath their feet is crumbly and loose, dissipating into powder in the wind as Marco and Annie dig down into the ground, loomed over by Ymir and Connie’s shadows as they look on. There’s a palpable held-breath across the comms, Jean and Eren uncharacteristically silent in the command module, watching tentatively across Ymir and Connie’s shoulder cameras for the signs of – well, _something_.

 

“Is that–?” Armin says in Ymir’s ear, “Is something _glowing_ down there, Captain?”

 

Ymir squints, but the loose debris that Marco sifts through with his fingers now is tinted pink, she thinks, some fluorescent glow seeping through the soil from below.

 

“Marco, stop,” she hisses, and the botanist freezes, looking back over his shoulder at her with wide eyes. “Don’t touch it.”

 

He nods as best he can, and as he and Annie start sweeping at the soil with brushes, Ymir checks the Geiger counter on her wrist, tapping the display with her index finger when it shows no divergence from the norm of solar radiation. Their suits are built to withstand most emissions, but corrosives are not stopped by a few millimetres of fibreglass shell. Biotoxins, acids, flammables – she lists all the things they cannot possibly know like a mantra. If she repeats the manual enough, she tells herself the universe cannot deviate from it.

 

“What–?” she hears Annie breathe, just audible enough to be picked up by comms. The navigator has frozen, her hands hovering above the hole excavated into the dusty ground. “What is that–?”

 

A clump of solid light, the size of a human heart, so dense and bright that it holds no real shape, no shadow, no idea of form, sits in the hollow in the ground as if fallen from the sky. It pulses electric, pink-purple light, matching the _ba-dum, ba-dum_ that reverberates in Ymir’s chest. The air around it glows, shimmering, iridescent, dancing in the way Ymir remembers air once did on a hot day above scorched tarmac, all those light years behind her on planet Earth.

 

“Is it alive?” Connie gasps, caught somewhere between leaping forward in curiosity, and darting away in fear of the unknown. Ymir knows the feeling well; she wishes to run, but something in her is rooted to the ammonia-rich ground, and her blood runs cold with it. It’s fear, it’s something more.

 

She thinks of Commander Smith and the Corporal, and them staring into the abyss crowned in light with the bolster of human arrogance, and she sees them in the reflections painted pink across the visors of her crew now. They look so real; so present; so not inside her head.

 

_Don’t look_ , she can’t help but think. _Whatever this is, it’s not for us._

 

“I don’t think it’s alive,” Marco frowns, prodding at the display on his wrist. “No recognised molecular structures. Not that that necessarily means anything cohesive without a proper NMR, but–”

 

“A rock, then,” Connie says, leaning forward decisively to grab the core of pink light with outstretched fingers. “Some sort of crystalloid, I guess, but I never seen luminescence like this before–”

 

“Stop,” Annie cuts in, her hand gripping Connie’s wrist before he can blink. She glances at Ymir, blue eyes piercing, even through her visor. “The Captain is right. We shouldn’t touch it until we know more.”

 

Ymir meets her gaze firmly, forcing herself not to waver. Annie doesn’t blink. She’s asking for guidance; Ymir knows not how to give it. She knows how to fly great, hulking spaceships across galaxies; she knows how to race cadet pods through the craters of the Moon under her supervising officers’ noses; she knows how to run, run away, not look back, keep going, ahead must always be better–

 

She does not know how to stand upon a distant planet, coax death and oblivion with the palm of one hand up in deference, and tell a geologist and a botanist and a crew full of eager explorers not to be the first ones to touch.

 

“Clock’s ticking, guys,” Jean cuts in across the comms. There’s something terse in his tone, strained; Ymir is sure it’s lost on the rest of them. “Whatever you got there, let’s bag it and leg it, please. I don’t wanna get a ticket for loitering.”

 

The wind strikes loose sand across Ymir’s visor, clinking against the glass. The crystal - and she calls it a crystal because it’s the only word that has been put to this thing that glows pink before her that makes any sense, and she _needs_ sense - pulses with light, inhaling, exhaling, dimmer, then brighter. She stares at in morbid fascination, unable to tear her gaze away, caught by some invisible gravitational pull, it would seem. She has seen nothing like it before.

 

It had been buried just beneath the topsoil, smothered in a blanket of loose ammonium-nitrate salt and precipitated sulphur. It was not metres down, buried by years and years and years longer than she could ever know. It was not scattered across the surface in some crash-landing from a distant civilisation that laughs and scoffs at the blind idiocy of the dying human race.

 

It was just waiting to be dug up. It feels like fate. Or worse, a squirming piece of bait on the end of a fishing line. Her father used to take her brother and sister fishing, before. Ymir doesn’t like it. She glares at the pink crystal, one part animosity, two parts dread. She decides she hates it, whatever it is, because she feels it has drawn them here on purpose. She feels it has guided her legs on puppet strings beyond her own volition. She feels like something bad is going to happen because of it.

 

The pink-purple light emanating from the glowing mass laps at the feet of her EVA suit like a baying tide. She takes a step back on instinct.

 

“Let’s get a cryogenic stasis pod out here,” she says, at last. Annie nods, glad for instruction. “No-one’s touching it. And then we’re leaving. Twenty minutes. Tops.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Steady now,” Marco says, waving his arms unnecessarily as the stasis pod crawls up the conveyor lift into the belly of the SAV. The ship creaks and groans, as if wheezing on a laboured breath. The crystal core pulses pink from within the chamber, light seeping through the Perspex walls that Ymir rues as not enough space between her and the thing they have discovered here. “Steady does it. Slow the lift a little, Connie. The wind is making it wobble.”

 

“Screw that,” Connie laughs - he _laughs_ , as if they’re not straddling a fine line of time that might be swept out from beneath their feet at any moment, “The sooner we get back to the Prov, the sooner I can get that thing to my lab, man. I wanna _know_. Don’t you wanna know?”

 

“Of course I want to know,” Marco retorts lightly, “But just saying, if it turns out to be biological, I get to name it. If it’s a rock, fine, it’s yours, but if it’s not–”

 

“How about we just focus on getting off this planet with our cargo intact, gentlemen,” Annie cuts in sharply, and both Marco and Connie wince.

 

“And besides,” Eren cuts in across the comms, oblivious, “It was _my_ idea to come down here, so I should get to name it. ‘S only fair. Finder’s keepers, y’know.”

 

“Piss off, Eren,” Jean snaps, “Like hell was it your idea. It was everyone. And besides, Cap gave the order, so Cap gets to name it.” Ymir can hear him smirk. “Any thoughts, Cap? Want a new element named after you?”

 

“Ymirium sounds good,” Connie lauds. He sounds so excited. They all do. “Like ytterbium, but easier to spell.”

 

Ymir purses her lips into a sharp line as she watches the glowing, pink core disappear into the hull, the latch of the cargo shoot closing with a hydraulic lethargy behind the stasis pod. A particularly sharp gust of wind clips her visor, jostling her on her already unsteady feet.

 

“I’ll think about it,” she says.

 

* * *

 

 

“Do you think we’ll get a good cut of it?” Connie asks, buckling into his seat at the back of the command module. Ymir tries to focus on her console, tries to tune out the conversation with the sound of Jean checking dials and tapping keys to her right, but succeeds little. “If it really is a brand new element, or whatever? That’s gotta inflate our pay check, right? New planet is yeah, whatever, but something like this is _cool_.”

 

“I hope so,” Eren admits, flicking a row of switches above his head. “I could use the credits. I’m broke.”

 

“Broke?” Marco chuckles, “But we got paid in advance for this, didn’t we? How did you blow all of that already?”

 

“Look, man,” Eren says, “You weren’t here before Mars, okay. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

 

Mikasa twists around in her seat, directly in front of Marco.

 

“Gambling,” she mouths. Marco snorts.

 

Ymir frowns.

 

“Alright,” she says pertinently, “I don’t know about you all, but I would like to get back to my ship. Can we begin launch proceedings, or would you like to waste another six months of your lives chatting shit?”

 

“Sorry, Cap,” Eren grins, clipping himself into his seat. “We’re all good. EMP thrusters engaged. Main engines are ready for activation. Sasha?”

 

“Clear for lift-off,” Sasha replies sprightly, “Readying the Prov airlock as we speak.”

 

Ymir has done this a thousand times. Probably more, if she were to count. She’s sat in classrooms and done the math; she’s directed sim after sim, for the sole purpose of shaving milliseconds off a perfect score; she was the Command Pilot on the Cassiopeia for eight, long, _really long_ years. She’s made ascents and descents; she’s made emergency landings, she’s made emergency take-offs; she’s made mid-air refuels; she’s made high-speed dockings with ships far less familiar and far less capable.

 

She knows intrinsically the thrum of her engines, the roar of magnetic propulsion, the groan of landing gear folding away. She could play the vibrations that rattle through her wrists during take-off as chords on a guitar.

 

The shuttle shakes robustly around them, numbers flash, and dials beep. The ground is left behind. Ymir keeps her hands steady on the joystick, one eye on the ascent angle, the other on where she knows the sky should be beyond the shutters. The take-off is not as smooth as Jean’s might be: not as seamless, or as effortless, or as stylish, but she feels it well enough in her bones. It’s instinctual. It’s what she’s always had.

 

She can’t help but think of the mystery in their cargo hold: the beacon that they heard across the galaxy, the pulse of pink light, the niggle in her gut. That’s instinct too. She doesn’t like the thought of something she cannot control being on board. She’s the sort of person who relies on herself, and herself alone. It’s taken her long enough to offer up that piece of trust to Jean, let alone anyone else. She doesn’t like variables.

 

Something doesn’t feel right.

 

“Sixty seconds to leaving local atmosphere,” Annie remarks, “Please ready for engine burst.”

 

“Five minutes, thirty seconds ‘til deceleration,” Eren adds, “Bit slow, but still looking good, Cap.”

 

“What’s my drive?” Ymir asks, steadying the shake of her arm by tightening her grip on the joystick. It’s trembling more than she’d like, which is something no set of numbers on a screen could tell her.

 

“Sixty-one percent,” Armin says from over her shoulder, “You can probably afford to push the thrusters a bit more, Captain.”

 

“Roger that,” she says, as Jean flicks switches on his side of the console. A prickle dances across the back of her neck in anticipation of the change-in-atmosphere engine flush, her fingers hovering over her command board - but it doesn’t come.

 

“Did the burn-out happen already?” she asks, “I didn’t feel it.”

 

“N… no,” Armin frowns, “Hang on, let me just check–”

 

“Pushing EMP thrusters. Increasing ascent speed by three and a half percent,” Ymir interrupts, stabbing at her console. “Fucking hate ammonia atmospheres. Make up 5% of the known universe, and yet still NASA don’t know how to build a ship that can deal with them –”

 

She’s interrupted by the screech of an alarm overhead, and bright, red lettering flashing across all the monitors laid out before her: _error_.

 

“What? What’s going on?” she barks, “Why’s that flashing? Eren?”

 

_Insufficient propulsion to maintain speed_ , flashes the screens.

 

Ymir’s personal God laughs. Fucking Murphy’s Law.

 

“ _Eren._ ”

 

“We’re not accelerating, Captain,” Armin cuts in, “We’re – we’re slowing down, and I don’t know why - we’re not going to be fast enough to pierce through the atmosphere, unless we–”

 

“I’m pushing the damn thrusters,” Ymir growls, “What does it say?”

 

“Fifty-three percent,” Armin squeaks, “And falling - Captain, I don’t–”

 

“We don’t have enough _fuel_ ,” Eren says then, “We’re burning through it too quick- fuck, I - I don’t understand, how is that - I triple checked it–”

 

“Not enough _fuel_?!” Ymir yells, the joystick jerking violently in her fist.

 

“I don’t know, Cap, I just–” Eren babbles, stabbing buttons on his screen manically, “Something must be haywire, it’s impossible, I - I checked it, I did, I swear. I gave us _extra_ , we-”

 

“Show me,” Ymir hisses. Fuel reserves flash up on her screen, smothering the error message, but not its infernal beeping. They’re flying on fumes.

 

“H-how,” Mikasa gasps, “How have we burnt through so much on ascent?!”

 

“Shit, I don’t know, Miks - if I knew, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now, would we!?” Eren snaps. He’s slamming his hands across his keyboard, green eyes wild and manic as he scrapes through the data whizzing across his screen.

 

“We should turn back,” Connie pleads, “Captain, we should make an emergency landing. Have a look at the thrusters. Have another go.”

 

“What about changing out incident angle?” Marco interjects, “Reduce the repulsion force of penetrating the outer atmosphere, right? That’ll cut down on the fuel we need, and we can just coast back on spurts–”

 

“We’re gonna deflect off the internal atmosphere whatever happens,” Jean barks a clipped panic rising in his voice, “So someone needs to tell me what to do. Am I turning this ship around or not? What am I doing? _Eren?_ ”

 

There’s a beat of silence, heavy like a heartbeat. Ymir almost doesn’t hear the rush of a depleting atmosphere burning up on the outside of her ship.

 

“We - we can’t make a second attempt. We can’t even make a first,” Armin whispers. “We don’t have enough fuel to make it back to the _Prov_.”

 

Ymir’s blood runs cold, her fists turning white upon the joystick. Jean, beside her, freezes, his busy, eloquent hands becoming blocks of lead on the ends of his arms. He turns his head searingly slowly to look back at Armin over his shoulder rest.

 

“ _What?_ ” Jean grits. “How is that _possible_?”

 

Armin opens his mouth to speak, although words splutter irreproachably on his tongue. It’s Eren who interrupts, unable to rip his eyes away from his screen.

 

“Shit, it’s - the shuttle is - we’ve almost _doubled_ our weight, Captain,” he rasps, “We’ve burned through our fuel reserves at quadruple the rate I thought, and I - we’re not - it’s gotta be - it’s gotta be that crystal thing, it’s fucking with our EMP or something, I don’t _know_ \- we’re too _heavy_ , Cap.”

 

“That doesn’t make any fucking sense!” Jean yells, “We brought that thing aboard no problem! How can it be that heavy, I–”

 

“Can’t we get the Prov closer?” Connie blabbers, “Sasha can bring it closer, she can–”

 

“We’re not gonna break the atmosphere!” Eren barks again, slamming his hands down on his console with a crash and a yell that makes them all jump. “The Prov won’t be able to get within miles of us, dammit!” He scrapes his hands down the front of his IVA visor, gloved fingers squeaking. “Fuck! _Fuck!_ ”

 

Ymir wants to say she’s had it worse. She wants to say she’s been in worse scrapes; wants to say she’s dodged asteroids in the belt of Jupiter in a pod racer; wants to say she’s crashed ships before on desolate planets; wants to say this is nothing, she can fix this, she knows what to do.

 

But all she can think of is those perfect scores. Those sim runs where they crashed it, and they died, but it was okay, because they could always have another go, and then go for drinks after and laugh it off.

 

The warning sirens and flashing lights don’t seem real. She’s staring at them, and the ship is trembling in her grasp, and it can’t be real, can it? They were laughing just seconds ago. Things like this are meant to be saved for the movies from long ago, edge-of-your-seat, popcorn-crunchers, will-they-won’t-they.

 

But the ship rumbles just a bit too loud, and the joystick in her grasp shudders just a little too cruelly, and that potent sense of dread just wouldn’t quite leave her alone.

 

Oh God. _Oh God_.

 

It’s never meant to be _won’t they_.

 

The open-mouthed silence that smothers them all, rattled by the violently vibrating shell of the command module, is that of a realisation that they’re going to die. And not just die - they’re going to splutter and fizzle and _fall_ back to the surface of the planet below, and even if they somehow survive that, then how long will their oxygen last? How long until the planet tips over the brink of the event horizon and they slowly cook from the inside out? How long until their feet begin to stretch and their atoms deform and they are compressed infinitely slowly into an infinitely small point in space and time?

 

It’s those goddamn variables again. They would surely lose their minds sooner.

 

_Error! Error! Error!_

 

Sirens blare overhead, ringing in Ymir’s ears, shaking her by the temples. It’s burning behind her eyes. Pressure pounds in her forehead. Jean is yelling at Eren again, wanting to know if he should turn them around; Armin is telling him no, they can’t, they’ll be _stuck_.

 

It makes no sense. _How_ can it make any sense? How can they be twice as heavy on ascent as they were on landing, how can they have burned through so much fuel so quick, how can they–

 

She feels hot, like she’s burning up. Her skin boiling, bubbling, bursting.

 

God. She didn’t want to go out like this. She didn’t want to be the laughing stock of the cosmos: the Captain who knew what it meant to fuck with a black hole, but tried her luck anyway.

 

She doesn’t want to be the textbook example of what not to do. She doesn’t want to be the case file studied in pilot training in some NASA classroom light years away, and then whispered about in the corridors after. She doesn’t want to become the worst space-disaster in the history of interstellar travel.

 

And worse: she doesn’t want to be remembered as _oh, that one brave, brave Captain. Put her crew at risk to stumble into the unknown. What splendid philosophy that must have been. One small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind._

 

Wrong, wrong, wrong. She was never brave. She was stubborn, she was curious, she was scared–

 

She doesn’t want to die.

 

There’s panic in the eyes of her colleagues - in the eyes of her friends. They are looking to her for guidance, for a miracle, for a _this is not our final chapter_. She’s proud of them, she thinks. She owes them. She would be screaming, crying, messy beyond deserving respect if she were them, and she were clinging onto the life-line of her superior officer.

 

“Captain!”

 

They are pleading.

 

_Think, think, think._

 

Turn around? They can’t. Even if they land again, what hope then? Not enough fuel to take-off a second time. Not enough time to call for help before the inevitable tumble into nothing. Could they fix it? There must be a way. If they were to discard that damn crystal thing, throw it back into the sand from whence it called, would the leftover fuel be enough? Could they pierce the atmosphere, and call the Prov to come collect them? Is there something else on board they could burn for propulsion? Could Sasha autopilot the rover down to the surface to ferry them back?

 

Is there enough time?

 

_Think, think, think. What would Jean do? What would Commander Smith do? What would–_

 

“Ymir,” Jean starts, his voice faltering, cracking in the worst possible way. She sees his mind working at a hundred miles an hour - but what use is that when they’re hurtling twice as fast as they can think? She knows they see the same thing. They’re going to ricochet off the outer atmosphere like a ping-pong ball. A fire-ball on impact. Blood boiling upon their hands, searing into their skin, rippling, bubbling, grotesque, the putrid stench of burning flesh alight in an atmosphere of ammonia. A cloud of dust obscuring the blue-green-shifted sky.

 

She wonders cruelly if, back on Earth, they’ll be able to see the dent they’re going to leave in this planet through the lenses of their telescopes as the people left behind long for just another brand of Hell–

 

“Eren,” she says, and his name escapes her lips a frantic breath. She turns around in her seat, and Eren’s bright green eyes are there, wide and doomed and leaking manic energy. “How much weight would we need to lose to make it all the way?”

 

“W … weight?” he repeats, dazed, and then it strikes him like a sharp fist across the face, and he all but recoils. Purpose is reignited in his eyes. He slaps a hand to the forehead of his visor. “Weight! Dammit, let me think–”

 

He squeezes his eyes shut, fists his fingers in the orange Nomex of his IVA, and his lips whittle across murmured numbers so fast Ymir could be mistaken to think the hull of the command module breeched, and wind seeping in through a whistling leak.

 

“Twelve- twelve thousand kilos- if - if we could lose about - about half the shuttle weight, we could accelerate enough and clear the - and–”

 

Ymir nods and turns back in her seat. She splays both palms flat on the control panel, the violent rumbling of the shuttle rattling up through her arms and threatening to pulverise her bones. She grits her teeth; sets her jaw. Time seems to slow infinitesimally.

 

“This is what we’re gonna do.” The severity of her voice surprises her, as if it’s not her own commands whistling from her lips at break-neck speed, but those of someone competent and self-assured. Her ears ring with the screech of tempering metal around her; she tries to block it out, pretend that it doesn’t sound like people dying. “We’re gonna lose the SAV. Decouple it from the command module. Leave it behind. That’ll _more_ than half our weight.”

 

“Lose the SAV?” Jean squawks, head whipping ‘round to stare at her in disbelief. “Are you fucking serious? We’ll end up spinning! There’s no way we’ll be able to dock with the Prov! I won’t be able to roll us out of that!”

 

“It’s that or become chow for that space vacuum cleaner down there,” Eren says, climbing out of his seat and scrambling through the zero-G to Ymir’s shoulder. “It’ll be like catching a baseball - it’s an Earth sport, you wouldn’t understand,” he continues, when Jean pulls a face. Eren turns to Ymir. “Cap, if we get Sasha to match our trajectory and speed, she’ll be able to cradle us with the ship. It won’t be pretty, and it’s probably gonna be the last time we’ll use that airlock, but–”

 

“But _nothing_ ,” Ymir snaps, her hands flying across the board of switches in front of her. “It’ll work. It’s your _job_ to make it work.” She uncouples her seatbelt, and a jolt of the shuttle has her slamming against the roof of the command module. She grimaces, but finds a handhold in the ceiling and rights herself with a steeling of her expression. Seven pairs of eyes are staring up at her, desperately; Jean’s hands are white where they’ve taken hold of the jittering wheel in Ymir’s place. Adrenaline threatens to deafen her.

 

Instructions spill out of her on autopilot, and she hasn’t the time to question where they came from. Maybe this is the sort of clarity people always talk about when they play folly with things like death and oblivion; maybe this is what it takes for her to earn her stripes.

 

“Annie, get through to the Prov, and make sure Sasha has the numbers down,” she commands, back still plastered to the ceiling, but authority rich in her voice. “Give her command authority over the EMP drive, and give her the coordinates to get in position to catch us. We only have one shot, and I sure as hell am not dying today.

Armin, I want to know speeds, I want to know distances, and I want to know them three minutes ago. Make sure Annie knows them and can plot a trajectory. Connie, Marco, get everything we can afford to ditch – rip it out of the walls if you have to, and pile it into the SAV – and make sure that damn crystal is strapped down and secure, because we are not gonna lose it after all of this _crap_.

Mikasa - help Eren with the SAV decoupling. You have my permission to use override commands. I don’t care if you have to tear this damn shuttle apart to get rid of it - I want it gone. And Jean–”

 

She pushes herself from the ceiling, propelling herself back into her seat, and planting her feet on the thrumming floor of the module with as much certainty as she can muster. She lashes herself to the firm plastic with her seatbelt, and it digs into her shoulders as she leans forward, stabbing buttons with her glove-fat fingers, transferring semi-automatic control to fully-manual. The shutters on the windshield begin to open, ammonia burning white-hot around the outer shell of the shuttle, and the dark recess of space hurtling towards them apparently not fast enough. Her hands wrap around the joystick between her knees with a fierce determination. No more numbers. This is by _her_ book now. “You and I are gonna fly this fucking thing.”

 

Jean’s wide-eyed terror collapses into a levelled jaw and a resolute nod, and in his belief in her, he gives her courage. He swivels around in his chair, eyes steadfast and stern, and his hands dance across the console like a concert pianist.

 

It’s a moment of triumph - misplaced and utterly _bizarre_ \- but she hears trumpets in her head, and the glare that burns their windows orange with the thinning atmosphere suddenly seems to part, as if her eyes at last might focus upon the bludgeoning stars approaching at light speed. She knows what she must do.

 

_Run, run, run_ , say the devils on her shoulder.

 

_Enough_ , she tells them back.

 

And for one, Valkyrian second, she feels as if they might all live.

 

“Captain,” Armin says, and his voice trembles with the giddiness of these damn cosmic ironies. “Doesn’t - isn’t the SAV only on manual decoupling?”

 

“What?” Ymir seethes, and for a moment she sees red. For once, could she not just have a chance–

 

“Armin’s right, Captain,” Mikasa says firmly, dragging herself from her seat and pushing her way through the zero-G to Eren’s side. “It’s manual only. I doubt it crossed their minds that we’d have to do an emergency separation mid-flight.”

 

“Shit, fuck, I–” Ymir bleeds, “Is there–”

 

“I’ll do it,” Eren says starkly. He doesn’t turn to look at Ymir; maybe he can’t.

 

“Eren, no,” Armin says, “That’s stupid, you can’t–”

 

“I’ll do it,” Eren repeats, “I’ll decouple it from the SAV side, and maybe I can make the jump back in my EVA to the command airlock, I don’t know. It’s my fault. I didn’t siphon enough fuel, I–”

 

“Eren, you can’t,” Ymir says. _You’ll die. If it can happen, it will happen_.

 

“I don’t think we have enough time for can’t, Cap,” Eren breathes. Mikasa’s hand is on his shoulder now, squeezing him through his IVA suit. “I gotta do it.”

 

“You reckless fuck,” Jean hisses, eyes ahead. “You have a fucking death wish.”

 

“The sooner I can get away from you, the better, Kirschtein,” Eren retorts weakly. “Miks, help me suit up.”

 

“Mikasa, stay in the hub,” Ymir instructs, unbuckling herself from her seat with a look thrown at Jean. “Jean, keep her steady. Don’t slow up. I’ll be back.”

 

She pushes up from her command chair, gliding over to Eren before the will leaves her dangling.

 

It’s hard to describe the look on Eren Yaeger’s face in that moment. Ymir reads people well – in the sense that she sees in other people the things she recognises deep within herself. There’s a stubborn set to Eren’s fierce eyes, but a fear too that she knows like her command console in the dark. Panic and adrenaline link their fingers across his jaw; the muscles in his face seem to ripple.

 

But there’s something more; an edge she cannot whittle down to something plane and scrutable. Reckless bravery, perhaps? She has always admired that in him. It’s a quality she holds in both high regard and complete contempt, that selfless sort of fury that spurs him on and upwards, whilst she stagnates somewhere below in cowardice. 

 

Does a real leader let this happen? Or do they volunteer in place? She does not know. She wonders if anyone really does.

 

“Captain, manual decoupling of the SAV goes against my fundamental programming,” Sasha says, “Crew safety would be compromised. I am unable to calculate the probability of survival. I am ... unable to permit this course of action.”

 

“Where’s your sense of humour, Sash,” Ymir says dryly, leaning into Eren’s control panel, over his shoulder. She flicks a row of switches, and lights flicker out. A keyboard ejects from the console desk, and her fingers rattle across the killswitch code, pausing over enter. Burning ammonia bellows on the other side of a foot of aluminium polycarbonate. Everything shakes. “I’m gonna have to put you to sleep. See you on the flipside.”

 

“Affirmative, Captain. Good luck.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Captain, I’m sealing the command module,” comes Mikasa’s voice over the comms, near drowned-out by the thunderous roar that rattles the shuttle, “Prepare for depressurisation.”

 

“We’re ready,” Ymir replies, and it’s just one lie of many she’s told across the years and across the stars, really. Eren looks as small a child as he ever has, drowned in his bulky, white EVA suit, breath fogging up the inside of his visor. She feels much the same.

 

The hydraulic door between the SAV and the command module wheezes shut between them, as if it might have all the time in the world. A whistle of air escapes its edges as the deadbolts slide across and the seal is made. A round porthole, barely bigger than a dinner plate, is her only window to the other side, and to Eren.

 

Behind her, she hears the hub door close too, and then the thrum of oxygen escaping rapidly from the makeshift airlock they have created, leaving Ymir suspended in a tunnel of vacuum. She feels the vibrations threatening to rip apart her ship through where her EVA-gloved hand clutches the door only. Everything else is still.

 

“Depressurisation complete, Captain, Eren,” Mikasa says, “I will count you down.”

 

“Are you ready?” Ymir asks, wondering if Eren can see the movement of her mouth through the barrier of the window and her EVA visor.

 

“The manual override lock is right here,” he replies, his voice obscured by the white noise of the comms; he sounds too artificial. “Decoupling, thirty seconds. Deceleration by thirty miles an hour, plus ten seconds to override door lock, less than that for your door. Should give me a gap of, what – fifty, sixty metres to jump? Piece of cake.”

 

“Piece of cake,” Ymir mutters, “The decompression might knock you out as you’re ejected, Eren.”

 

“As long as I’m lined up, I’ll be fine,” he grins, “You’ll catch me, right, Cap?”

 

Ymir presses her lips into a thin, taught line. There’s no answer to that question that feels sufficient. Both beg the wrath of that damned God of hers.

 

“Deep breaths please, the both of you,” comes Mikasa’s voice, “Keep that blood pressure low. Ten seconds.”

 

Ymir gulps. She dangles over the edge of panic.

 

“Are you afraid of burning, Captain?” Eren asks, as if the lick of gasoline is already upon his lips.

 

_No_ , she thinks, _It’s you I’m afraid for._

 

Eren smiles.

 

“I am,” he says, near-nonchalantly. “Give me a promotion for this, alright, Cap?”

 

She opens her mouth to speak, but beyond the window he is jimmying open a panel in the wall, and typing in the override codes, and dancing the precipice of the red lever not-to-be-pulled with fingers she has never seen stutter so.

 

“Eren,” she says, breathing his name. He doesn’t hear. He pulls the lever, and the ship heaves a sigh, hydraulic claws retracting, compressed air expelling jet streams into the vacuum of space. Clouds of condensing oxygen smother the window into the universe, obscuring Eren from view for a moment.

 

The SAV detaches.

 

And then there’s empty space between the two parts of the ship. Between them.

 

“Manual decoupling complete!” Eren yells across the comms, his voice a crackle of static against the roar of atmosphere burning up into the vacuum of quiet space mere inches from Ymir’s face. “Commencing override sequence on door! Knock, knock, Captain!”

 

Ymir’s blood is cold, icy and frozen within her veins; she functions on adrenaline only, stabbing the touchpad on the door with her stubby fingers as she enters the override passcodes before the oxygen in her lungs outstays its welcome. Warning messages flash across the screen, but she ignores them. Maybe prayers will out do science this one time.

 

The airlock door grunts as it slides open; Ymir is buffeted by escaping atmosphere, the pressure inside their makeshift airlock not entirely stabilised. The tie that lashes her suit to the ship tugs jerkily at the carabiner clipped to her waist, and she feels short of breath.

 

The surface of the planet accelerates away from them in the opposite direction, and the vast emptiness of space floods the gap between. Stars prick at her peripheral; the black hole stares her down, unforgiving. _Small human Captain, why don’t you come on home._

 

The SAV is already falling away so fast.

 

“Airlock open,” Ymir barks into her helmet, “Eren!”

 

“Almost there, almost there!” Eren calls back, “Five seconds, four seconds– _mmph-urk_!”

 

She sees the door on the SAV tear open, blown off its hinges by the expulsion of force from within, and Eren is shot out like a catapult, a bullet of white Nomex and visor glass amidst clouds of oxygen and CO2, tumbling in explosive, dizzying circles towards her.

 

She twists her arm around in her tie, grappling herself to the walls of the command module as the shuttle is flung into a vicious spin, and braces herself to catch him, the G-force already burning up the muscles in her outstretched hand–

 

“C’mon!” she screams hoarse at the stars.

 

He’s going to make it, he’s going to–

 

His body collides with the side of the command module with a sickening thud that does not reverberate, but that Ymir still hears, somehow, somewhere. He folds unnatural across the aluminium framework like a paper airplane, his helmet cracking against the metal, but his hands, his arms flail, limp and ungrasping. She lunges for his ankle – the only part of him she can reach – but her fingers close around empty nothing.

 

“Eren!”

 

And he falls. She tries to jump, she does – but the rope tying her to the ship, to her crew, to her duty, yanks her hard, and pulls her back inside the airlock with whiplash force.

 

“Eren! _Eren!_ ”

 

The comms shrieks with white noise, tearing up her eardrums and cleaving into her head, and if he cries out as he slips free of the ship and is snatched away by the massive clutch of deceleration, she doesn’t know, doesn’t hear. Maybe he is already dead.

 

The SAV becomes a comet, white-hot, red-hot, charcoal ruins in the atmosphere beneath them, and then it’s gone, gone, gone–

 

“Eren!” she shrieks again, but it’s lost. The violent spin of the command module has her seeing double, her insides mush, her head pounding; she can’t see him, can’t find him in the encroaching distance; can’t pinpoint a space in time for how the G-force knocks her around the airlock like a stone rattling in a tin can.

 

“Captain!” Mikasa shouts, “Captain, do you have him!? Can I close the airlock?! Captain!”

 

He’s gone. She doesn’t need to see him to know he burns, supernova on impact.

 

“Captain! Is Eren on-board!?”

 

“I – I –” she stammers, vomiting up gasps of air that wrench at her diaphragm, “I – he – I didn’t catch him –”

 

Eviscerating silence. The universe keeps on spinning; Ymir’s stomach churns, bile scoring up the inside of her throat. He’s just … gone.

 

_No, he still has to jump, surely –_

 

She waits for the cries that never come; the comms fizzes in and out of obscurity. Mikasa says nothing. Ymir’s brain beats against the inside of her skull with all this damn spinning. She teeters on the brink of blacking out, and maybe she slips once or twice, she cannot say. The universe whirls around and around and around—

 

“Captain!” comes Jean’s voice, raw and rasping, but still there, still present, “Captain, get up here! I can’t hold this spin!”

 

The carcass of the SAV is little more than shards of fragmented metal shrivelling up in an ammonia atmosphere and shooting off in ten different directions like a handful of bottle rockets. Eren is gone.

 

_Eren is–_

 

“Ymir, _please_!” Jean cries, shrill and pleading. Ymir’s hand lashes out on its own accord, slamming palm-first into the Holo on the wall. The airlock door closes with a whisper. The walls are still, but the G-force exerted by their spinning still has her insides churning organ-over-organ. Vomit erupts up her throat and burns the inside of her mouth; she keeps her lips sealed, gags, and feels it burn like Hell on the way back down. 

 

“Fifty-five seconds until impact with the Providentia,” says Annie across the comms, “Captain, we need to match the rotation of the shuttle with that of the ship. Or else we’ll crash.”

 

“Ymir!”

 

She moves – she knows she does. She unclips the tether on her belt, and pushes herself back through the tunnel to the hub door; her legs drags in the zero-G and her arms scrabble at the door. She sees them doing so.

 

She hears the deadbolt click and the seal hiss as the airlock tunnel repressurises, a whistle of flooding oxygen. She blinks heavily as her head becomes light with the gorging of air less saturated in CO2. She sees the stars twinkling, and the hull of the Providentia, white and glistening in the gold abyss light, approaching before them, all a blur of spinning colour. It feels like she’s in a kaleidoscope.

 

But she feels none of it. The door opens, and the crew aren’t looking at her, all their eyes trained on their screens or the sky beyond. Mikasa has tear tracks scoring her face. Jean’s eyes are set determined on the spiralling skies and the streaks of cosmic colour they have blurred into.

 

She pushes off the wall with her feet, launching herself through the air to her pilot’s chair. Jean struggles white-knuckled with the quivering joystick in one hand, and an array of manically-flashing lights beneath the fingers of the other. Sweat covers his brow through the sheen of his visor.

 

“Forty-five seconds until impact,” Annie says sharply.

 

“Vent the fuel cell coolants,” Ymir retorts. Her voice is not her own; her mind is not her own, a host to some wretched creature that learned long ago how to survive on hurt and pain and numbness. “It’ll neutralise spin velocity.”

 

“Understood,” says Marco, rapidly flicking switches. A great hiss of vaporised water spurts as clouds across the windows; the Prov rears ever closer. “Coolants venting. Spinning at 0.351 radians per second and slowing.”

 

“It’s not enough,” Ymir growls. The Prov spins at half the angular momentum. They’re going to crash.

 

“Patching through to Sasha’s mainframe,” Annie replies, “I will try to match the rotation speed on the Prov to us remotely. Look for Airlock 1, Captain.”

 

She straps herself into her chair and tries to find the airlock on the hull of the Prov, but they’re spinning like a pneumatic drill still, and it scatters stars behind her eyes.

 

“I’m going to try and roll us,” she snaps, gripping the joystick between her hands as firmly as she can in her EVA suit. It jostles with her, taking all the strength she can muster to stop it from flailing out of control. “Jean, spurt the thrusters every fort-five degrees. What else can we vent?”

 

“I’ve got the hydrazine cells!” Connie shouts, “Venting now!”

 

“Nineteen seconds, Captain.”

 

“Okay! Marco, decompress the SAV tunnel!”

 

“Yes!”

 

“Fourteen seconds!”

 

The hull of the Prov is inexplicably close, a wall of metal looming up before the windows, near-matching spin for spin as they tumble flailing through the vacuum. Panels and fuel cells and serial numbers are visible upon its great flank; the door of Airlock 1 passes before them, and then out of sight. 

 

“Prepare for docking!” Ymir yells, above the thunder, “Brace for impact!”

 

She’s done emergency docks on the sim more times than she can count, but it’s nothing like the shudder and the shattering sound of metal that rips through the command hub, throwing them all forwards. Sparks fly across the windows; the ship groans in agony. Her belt digs into her shoulders, but beside her, she sees Jean thrust against the control panel, the edge winding him in the ribs. He grunts, but doesn’t release the joystick.

 

Alarms blare like sirens, shrill and piercing, and lights flash red, always red, angry and aggressive and _fearful_. She hears the pneumatic claws of the airlock seal try to grab hold of the command module, but they scrabble at the aluminium without success. Ymir’s breath comes heavy, but they’re not there yet. Not close.

 

A loud buzzing fills the command module then, intermittent spurts of white noise.

 

“Cap … able … seal,” croaks a voice familiar. “Lock … ged …”

 

“Sasha!” Ymir shouts, “Someone patch her through on a different channel!”

 

“Changing to channel two!” Connie calls back, “Sasha, babe! You here?!”

 

“Capt …” Sasha says, her voice broken up by a loud explosion that rumbles violently through the shell of the command module. “Unable … establish p … sure seal,” Sasha says, “Airl … damaged.”

 

“Manual override authorised,” Ymir rasps, “Open the damn airlock! Password – password: _Maria_.”

 

“We … lose operation … airlock, Captain,” Sasha replies. Another loud bang erupts overhead; Ymir flinches.

 

“I said, _Maria_!”

 

“Understood, … tain. Opening air … door. Please br … for rapid decompression.”

 

“Helmets and belts!” Ymir yells, and maybe her voice is lost to the roar of searing metal burning white-hot, to Jean’s deaf ears as he fights with the joystick with iron-white fists and gritted teeth, to the tears that stream down Armin’s splotchy-red face as he grips the sides of his chair for dear life.

 

Ymir squeezes her eyes shut and clamps her lips tight around the damning words that want to rip themselves from her throat.

 

She has no warning. The door behind them explodes with a deafening burst of condensed air, ripped off its hinges, and they’re all flung forwards in their seats violently. Panels are yanked from the walls and sparks fly from the control panel as sheets of plastic are ripped away to uncover raw wires; Ymir’s forehead cracks against the inside of her visor, pain forking across her temples and down the back of her neck. Her belt cuts into her sternum even through the gauze of her EVA suit, brutally compressing the air from her lungs; her ribs seize and she feels splinters rupturing across her bones.

 

“Is everyone alright?!” she hears Marco yell, somewhere within the ringing in her ears and the rush of air escaping the command module. “Captain!”

 

“Yes!” she yells back, her fingers struggling on her belt. Something flies off the command module, a piece of plastic strung with wires, and it clips her in the shoulder with a sharp stab of pain as it’s sucked towards the airlock. Ymir hisses, throwing herself from her seat and slamming into the wreckage of the console. She scrabbles for handholds in anything she can find, her body surging beyond her control. “Everybody out and into the airlock! Now!” 

 

Marco untangles himself from his seat and floats towards the ceiling almost immediately, tossed against the hard plastic by the shaking of the command module. Mikasa struggles to unclip Armin from his seat, her hands desperate as Armin tries fruitlessly to rub at his face through the shield of his visor. A ragged piece of plastic hits Mikasa square between the shoulder blades, and she flinches, but doesn’t stop.

 

Jean still has the joystick clamped between two hands, his shoulders heaving beneath his suit, his eyes fixated on the flashing console before him, unmoving. Ymir stares at him, her back flush against the console, but Jean sees nothing, stuck in some limbo of loud noise inside his ears.

 

Shock. He’s in shock.

 

Ymir reaches out to shake his shoulder, but her suit is caught by a sharp piece of plastic, and it tears through the white shell with a hiss. She growls, clamping her hand over the gash in her forearm as warnings blare on the inside of her visor: _suit breeched! Suit breeched!_

 

“Jean!” she yells through clenched teeth, “Jean, snap out of it!”

 

The console flashes bright, a cacophony of electric colour, and then short-circuits, plunging the hub into barely-lit dark. Someone yells out in panic – she’s not sure who – and then the lights come flooding on again, brighter, more blinding that before, erratically blinking like a string of Christmas lights.

 

Ymir lunges for him again, the oxygen in her suit whistling out between her fingers. It’s only a small rip. She’ll live, she’ll live.

 

“Jean!” she snaps, walloping him with her shoulder. He looks up. His eyes are glazed, but life seems to return to him when he sees whatever he sees upon her face. Maybe she’s terrifying. Good.

 

“Let’s go!” she cries again, reaching for his straps and tearing them loose, before shoving him with all her might from his seat. She pushes him hard, giving him the momentum needed to propel towards the airlock door. The same force pushes her back against the carcass of the console with a hefty thud. “Move!”

 

Jean tumbles through the air, and she almost breathes amidst the chaos: rapid lights, her hissing suit, sparks flying free of dangling wires. The blare overhead of _breech, breech, breech_.

 

“Captain, come on!”

 

Annie clings to the remnants of the door, the stasis pod containing the crystal – the damn _crystal_ – pressed beneath one arm, pulsing pink and purple. Connie clings to her leg, trying desperately to keep himself upright and push on through to the airlock chamber, and not be tossed and turned and slammed into a torn-up wall by the current of rapidly escaping oxygen that flares up in white clouds behind them, plumes of vapour battling for the gaps in the pressure seal and escaping out into vacuum. Annie’s eyes are icy blue, even through the mask of her visor.

 

In that same blue, Ymir thinks of Erwin, her commander, she _commanded_. She untangles herself from the ravaged skeleton of the control panel, compressed oxygen roaring around her and wringing her dry. Her heart throbs like a jack-hammer, ricocheting against the inside of her ribs; blood crusts along her hairline and around her nostrils.

 

_Live, that’s an order._

 

She thinks of her father, who she left behind on Earth so she could do just that. She was not following orders when she left him to die down there.

 

She weaves through the debris scattered throughout the module cabin, sparks still flying, and shards of sharp, ragged plastic being dragged towards the leak in the airlock. Her shoulder throbs and bruises bloom achingly across her chest and beneath her ribs; she pushes herself too hard from the flank of the console, and hits the hard plastic of Eren’s abandoned station head-on, clattering against it with a grunt, her visor smacking against the headrest.

 

Ymir sees legs flail past her, feels panic and adrenaline incinerate in her temples despite knowing the temperature must be plummeting, knows that their IVA suits were not built to withstand this sort of pressure–

 

A strong arm grapples her by the waist, and the friction of another body in an IVA suit rubs against hers. She looks up and her eyes catch Marco’s name tag sewn onto his breast amidst the clouds of pluming oxygen; he squeezes her tighter, and pushes her forward, sending her careening through the air towards the airlock door and after the others. She scrambles for a hand-hold, trying desperately to keep herself upright, and feels Marco collide with her feet, his fingers finding her ankle and holding tight.

 

They tumble out into the airlock, strewn with parts of her console and hissing with the escaping air, and her chest feels tight, caught in a vice that is slowly squeezing her for all she’s worth. Marco feels it too, wheezing and struggling to keep a hold of her, buffeted by the steady airstream that tries to slam him against the ceiling. Ymir finds a grip in a loose panel against the wall and digs her fingers in. She sees Jean surge ahead, launching himself from the wall with a forceful kick and pushing past the others to pound his fist on the inner vault door, blood on the first four knuckles.

 

“Dammit, Sasha, hurry up!” he yells furiously, screaming into the inside of his helmet. The decompression whistles around them, screeching white noise, blaring like static on the intercom. The rip in Ymir’s suit flaps beneath her fingers like a sail caught in a hurricane; the breeching siren inside her helmet is so loud, it’s so god damn loud–

 

“Unable … stabilise pressure in … ter airlock vault,” Sasha replies, her voice buzzing with interference. Ymir growls, and her arm cries out in pain as she hauls herself closer to the wall, dragging Marco’s weight with her, squeezing desperately at her forearm with her free hand.

 

“Open this God damn door!”

 

“Unable to stabilise pr–”

 

Jean shouts, harsh and hard and unintelligible, and slams his fist against the sealed door again. He twists, and Ymir catches his eyes, manic, as he drags himself along the door towards the fizzling Holo embedded in the chamber wall. His fingers are clumsy upon the keyboard.

 

“Inner airlock vault, manual override,” Jean barks, “Operator: Command Pilot Kirschtein–”

 

“Airlock w… suffer irredeemable damage t… mainframe. Systems will be incapacitated.”

 

“–password: Sina. Open the fucking door!”

 

“... Airlock door opening. Please prepare … decompression.”

 

Alarms ring shrill overhead, lights flashing in strobe, but the door of the inner airlock chamber begins to part; a rush of air slams into Ymir once more, and she nearly loses her clasp on the ceiling, save for Marco’s strong arm holding her in a death-grip around her waist, making her bruised ribs burn.

 

“Everybody move!” Jean commands, pushing his way through the door as decompression buffets him like a boat swallowed up at sea. Blood drips from Ymir’s forehead, across her eye, crusting along her lash line, making it hard to see. Her body screams for safety. They do not have to be told twice.

 

* * *

 

 

The Prov airlock closes behind them with a pneumatic gas, the hiss of escaping oxygen and the frazzle of flying sparks in the outer chamber silenced by an inch of aluminium polycarbonate. Lights still flash overheard, red and angry, but the incessant alarms have screeched in and out of oblivion one last time, and become silent.

 

“Pressure stabilising,” comes Sasha’s voice overhead, although it sounds faint and distant against the swamping cotton in Ymir’s ears. “Hold on, please, Captain.”

 

Ymir hears the tell-tale _beep beep beep_ of the atmosphere regulator, and the hot air inside her begins to escape; she watches as the others sink towards the floor, their weightless, orange arms, blown up like balloons, slowly falling to their sides.

 

Ymir’s feet feel ground beneath them. Gravity sucks out the breath she was holding.

 

A wet and messy gasp rips its way out of her throat, and her legs give out beneath her as she collapses to the floor of the airlock, breathing ragged and wretched as her head hits the ground and her eyes hit the ceiling. Everything is white and ringing shrill and demanding. Her lungs burn.

 

The oxygen-rich air is flooded with hydraulic gasps and frantic breathing, staggering precariously on the precipice of hysteria. Someone sobs; someone snivels.

 

Mikasa collapses almost as soon as her feet are on the ground, her legs crumpling and her back sliding down against the wall as she tries to find a hand to hold. Her head sags heavy against her shoulders, and she _sobs_ , as Armin all but trips over himself to flee, ripping off his helmet and tossing it to the ground as his hand flies to his mouth, in a fruitless hope to keep the bile down his throat. He pounds his lily-livered fist on the Holo of the door, and it wheezes open not nearly quick enough for the way he lurches out of the airlock and into the slow-rotating passages of the Providentia.

 

Helmets fall the floor as Marco and Connie abandon theirs; Marco swipes his gloved-hands across his face, pawing at his reddened cheeks. Ghosts sit in the hollows of Connie’s expression, drawn and pallid and nauseous as he scrubs his hands up and down his arms for warmth.

 

Annie has the crystal in her grasp, locked away in its glass prison and pulsing with purple, enigmatic light; she meets Ymir’s gaze as the pink refracts across the visors of both their helmets, and it's cold and stony and silent in all the worst ways. Her strides are long and purposeful, unimpeded by the bulk of her IVA, as she marches from the airlock, stormy.

 

Ymir feels bleached in shock, and imagines paint thinner being poured down her throat, caustic upon her insides as she is painted white and nothing from the inside out. Her whole body feels cold, but so cold that she tips over that point where her nerves are so frayed that they cannot tell cold from hot, and all she knows is that it burns, and it hurts, _by God_.

 

With a wheeze, she rolls herself over onto her side, weak and limp, as if her spine and all her bones have been wrenched from her chest with a sharp tug and she is all but boneless. Her thick suit hugs her chest too tight, the buckles digging into her bruising flesh, and her neck feels too spineless to hold up the weight of her head. Her helmet hits the deck again with a clunk as her eyes fall blearily upon her co-pilot.

 

Jean stands with head against the door, forehead presses against the plastic and fists curled taught at his sides. His eyes are closed and his back rises and falls like a tide, an ebb and flow. Ymir wonders if he would be red-hot to the touch.

 

_Are you afraid of burning?_

 

She rips off her helmet and hears something break on its attachment, a clasp snapping or a bolt flying loose, and she throws it to the floor, begging for it to break. A pained yell is torn from her chest, mangled and disgusting and angry angry angry; her knees dig into the floor and she crumbles, pounding her fists on the hard plastic and smiting her forehead against the ground until her eyes sting with a trickle of blood that creeps down from her hairline and clouds across her cornea.

 

She screeches again, unintelligible. The cosmos unravels from her chapped and bloody mouth. Her throat burns dry with the taste of vomit, twice as bad on the way back down as it was on the way up, gagging in her mouth. Acid-tasting saliva flies from her lips and sticks to her chin. Her knuckles bruise through her thick gloves; blood crusts open the ripped edges of her suit. She’s burning up on her own re-entry.

 

She chokes on the next sound that leaves her mouth, and she breaks for the very first time.

 

“ _Eren._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look at that, a project I actually updated! (If only Droplets got this kind of attention ...)
> 
> I'm sure the pace feels quite choppy at this point, but Eren's death (?) is a catalyst for the rest of the story, so think of this as the second half of the exposition. Not that this fic is going to be very long, but ... (Alternatively, maybe I just suck at writing action. It's pretty hard. I don't think I've perfected it yet ... a classic slice-of-life drama is more my comfort zone when it comes to style.)
> 
> Anyway! Krista appears in the next chapter, so I can finally live up to my promise of space lesbians. How and why she appears, maybe you can guess. I think the next chapter will be one of the best! It's got some of my favourite scenes in it, and really gets the ball rolling for the philosophy side of the story.
> 
>  
> 
> Glossary of terms for this chapter:
> 
> EVA: extravehicular activity suit, used for work outside the spacecraft (basically, the big, white spacesuits)  
> IVA: intravehicular activity suit, used for work inside the spacecraft (basically, the thinner, oft-orange suits)  
> CAPCOM: capsule communicator, so basically NASA's mission control  
> SAV: surface access vehicle  
> EMP: electromagnetic propulsion drive (basically, it's an alternative to just burning rocket fuel or using nuclear warheads to power your rocket ... Google it, 'cus it's gonna be the way in the future!)  
> NMR: nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy
> 
> Hope you enjoyed the update! Please leave a kudos if you enjoyed, and hit me up with a comment if you have the time! Thanks so much for all the great feedback so far; it really means the world to me, especially on a fledgling project. Until next time!


	3. Serpens Caput

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In death, one belongs to the universe.

_“You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”_

― Carl Sagan, _Contact_

 

 

Bowen: [distraught] _And now, without you, Draco, what do we do? Where do we turn?_

Draco's voice: [comforting] _To the stars, Bowen. To the stars._

―  Charles Edward Pogue, _Dragonheart_

 

 

 _“How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.”_  
  
― W.G. Sebald, _Vertigo_

 

 

* * *

 

 

Stardate: _82153.14, 2571 days since Mars departure_

 

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER ADDRESSING CAMERA, PROVIDENTIA BRIDGE]

 

[TRANSCRIPT] _I just …_

 

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER LOOKS OFF-CAMERA, THEN RUNS HANDS THROUGH HAIR. SIGHS DEEPLY.]

 

[TRANSCRIPT]: _There’s been an accident._ [PAUSE] _Flight engineer Eren Yaeger – fuck. Fuck, I can’t do this._

 

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER APPEARS EMOTIONALLY UNSTABLE. STANDS, DISAPPEARS FROM SCREEN, REAPPEARS IN PILOT’S CHAIR IN BACKGROUND OF SHOT. DOES NOT TURN OFF CAMERA.]

 

[VISUAL: COMMAND PILOT, JEAN KIRSCHTEIN, APPEARS ON SCREEN, TAKES SEAT IN VACANT CHAIR, ADJUSTS ANGLE OF CAMERA.]

 

[TRANSCRIPT]: _Command Pilot Jean Kirschtein taking over Captain’s Log duty. There has been an accident. We have … we have lost Flight Engineer Eren Yaeger. Cause of death: undetermined, but … God …_

 

[VISUAL: COMMAND PILOT LOOKS OFF-CAMERA]

 

[TRANSCRIPT]: _Cause of death either grievous bodily trauma, or massive heat exposure. The body could not be recovered. CAPCOM has been informed, and we’re waiting for a response which is likely two weeks away. The incident was beyond our control, and we – the crew – the crew is taking it hard._

 

_An emergency docking procedure has damaged Air Lock 1, and the Prov mainframe to some extent. We don’t yet know how much of the system is impaired. SASHA is running diagnostics, but her processor was affected by the crash. Comms Officer Arlert is doing his best to patch up what we can see is wrong, and – and we’re trying to cope without Eren. It’s going to take a bit longer to assess all the issues. Air Lock 2 and the Rover remain operational, although use of the SAV has been – has been lost. We will continue to make trajectory for Janus II._

 

_The Captain –_

 

[VISUAL]: COMMAND PILOT TURNS IN CHAIR, LOOKS BEHIND AT THE COMMANDING OFFICER WHO HAS NOT MOVED.

 

[TRANSCRIPT]: _We found something weird. I don’t know what it is, but – well. I don’t know what it is._

 

* * *

 

 

Ymir tries to tuck her legs beneath herself on the seat, but her feet keep slipping from the edge, too much of her in one space, and she startles every time her toes hit the floor. She grunts in frustration. There’s a drill in her head, a madness, and it won’t relent - not until she claws her temples apart.

 

Eons of stars stretch out before her, through the great windows of the Providentia bridge, infinite and unbearable emptiness. Asteroids and stellar systems and supernovas that she will never know, never touch with out-stretched fingers. The swirling silt of the black hole licks at the corner of the window, a fuzzy haze of yellow and gold, only a whimper of the majestic violence just beyond their starboard side.

 

Jean turns off the camera over the Nav desk pointedly, turning in the chair with a prolonged squeak that cuts the stuffy silence. He doesn’t move, not for a moment, staring at her with his hands laid flat upon his thighs.

 

Bile ebbs and flows within her throat, teetering on the edge of flooding her mouth. She’s not sure how many times she’s had to make the mad dash to the composter to empty her guts out in the last few hours, but her body shivers with the toil of it. She’s exhausted, but sleep abates her. She feels too tightly wired to do anything but stare.

 

Transistors whir and hum; the ship groans, sick. It creaks with noises it is not meant to make, and each and every sound turns Ymir’s stomach. They’ve lost Air Lock 1, and the SAV is irretrievable. The crash short-circuited the electronics in half the ship; a fire broke out in Marco’s lab, turning to cinders most of the samples he brought along from home. Half the Holos show nothing more than a blue screen split with white noise when turned on. God only knows if their oxygen, or their water, or their fuel, has been impeded.

 

They’re limping through the universe in a tin can shot full of holes. Home is so very far away – for those that can call it home, at least.

 

 _Or just another dead planet_ , Ymir thinks, sinking lower in her seat. How many of the stars that stare back at her are just the same? How many are echoes of suns long dead? How many are cindered planets and toxic atmospheres? How many are finite beacons of light, spinning through the cosmos?

 

How many required blood?

 

She closes her eyes, the weight seizing upon her shoulders in the same instance, a devil on her back she just can’t shake, a coil in her muscles she just can’t spring. She feels as if she would sink in any river, water or stardust, too heavy to obey laws of no gravity. If there was a bottom of the universe, she would be trudging through the sludge there. She would be lying down to die in it.

 

“Ymir –” Jean starts, tired and weary and had-enough, and that’s enough, just her name. The tension cracks within her.

 

“Don’t,” she hisses, “Don’t. Not yet. I don’t want to talk.”

 

“Ymir, c’mon –” he sighs, the crease between his brows a fissure. There’s not a note in his voice that suggests he’s willing to compromise. She hasn’t said a word to him since they stumbled from Air Lock 1, delirious on grief and the vomit in their mouths.

 

It was hours ago. Maybe days? Who really knows.

 

“You can’t do this,” he says, stern, “You can’t shut down – not when – not when we need you. There’s protocol. There’s stuff we have to – stuff we have to do for – for _him_. For Eren. We need to figure out why this–”

 

“I did this!” she snaps unnecessarily, and Jean’s exasperated expression twists into an angry scowl. “It’s my fault! I did the wrong thing and I fucked us over, I–” She heaves wetly, curling in on herself, tangling herself, all long legs and gangly arms, into a knot of unsavoury thoughts. “I got Eren killed, I’m gonna get us all killed. I–”

 

“Eren saved us, God damnit!” Jean spits, and he’s on his feet in the blink of an eye, lunging across the space between her and him in a few, ferocious strides. Ymir recoils, positive he’s about to grab her from the way his fingers spasm. But he growls, deep and low, and rakes his trembling hands angry through his sweat-slick hair.

 

“He saved us, he _sacrificed_ himself so we could be here, so we could be still alive – do you _get_ that?” He lashes out at the base of his pilot’s chair in frustration, kicking it with a sharp and violent thrust of his bare foot, and grimaces as his toes coils against the unforgiving metal with pain that makes his lips curl. Ymir sees his eyes prick; there’s an ugly sound brewing in his throat; his face screws up into all sorts of agony he doesn’t want to attest to, but that strips him naked none the less.

 

“ _Alive_ ,” he continues in a horrid, fuming whisper. “We’re _alive_ because of him, by God. You don’t get to take the blame for this. You don’t get to pretend this was you! He decided. He was adamant about going, about doing this, he was – it was – it was – we _all_ made the decision. We all decided – fuck. Fuck!”

 

He braces himself on the headrest of his seat with arms outstretched, and ducks his head between his heaving shoulders. The wretch that convulses up his spine reminds Ymir of a parasite trying to be born from beneath his skin – she’s seen all the old movies, the films that indulged in such horror staples, but somehow it’s all the worse to see someone flinch like that when the only thing ripping them apart is regret.

 

“We killed him,” Ymir shakes, her voice a flat, grey fog. Her eyes close as she lays her forehead on the command console; the metal is neither cool or hot, just present. “We did. He saved us, and we got him fucking killed. And for what.”

 

She knows there’s not a way in Heaven or on Earth – or in the furthest reaches of deep space – for her to pay him back for that.

 

“I don’t want this, Jean,” she whispers, then, “I can’t do this anymore.” 

 

His fierce frown fragments for a moment – something sympathetic flitters across his angry face. She’s sure her shadow spilt by the milky starlight shrinks behind her, at least in his eyes. His stare hardens again, his honey-coloured eyes crystallising.

 

_O, pathetic creature. What foolish dreams you entertained to think you had a chance at playing Atlas._

 

Jean shakes his head. He’s reached his limit – it was only a matter of time. He does not want to deal with her any more, not when there are things that must be done, and grief that must be born, and she is just a child, clutching at straws where she has abandoned responsibility down the toilet bowl.

 

“You don’t have a choice,” he says, and it bites. His knuckles squeeze his seat, and then he’s gone. He turns away, and doesn’t look back at her.

 

* * *

 

 

Ymir misses the rain.

 

The last time she saw rain, she was sixteen years old and IVA-clad and plodding along the boardwalk to the NASA _Amalthea_ , her ticket away from Earth, listening to her heartbeat in her ears, and not the droplets splattering against the aluminium.

 

She wishes she’d taken the time to care more; but when the rain fell acidic with carbon dioxide, few people did. She remembers the smog; the scorching summers and muggy winters; the big, plasma screens that played in the city square before curfew, boasting images of clear skies and sunrises and things that let people pretend they were seeing it with their own two eyes.

 

She’d ignored the rain most of her life, and now she regrets it. She misses weather; changing seasons; storms and thunder. The passing of time.

 

There’s no atmosphere on the moon; not enough water in the air on Mars. Most of her crew have never seen rain; have never stood outside their house in a downpour and tasted it on their tongue; never fallen asleep to the white-noise beating down on a flimsy roof.

 

She misses most the sound of rain upon glass windows. Here, in the deep recesses of space, she can’t fool herself into believing that the taps and sigh upon the windows of the bridge are water. Ghosts, more likely. Her ghosts, begging her for an acknowledgement she can never not give. She tries to turn her head and ignore them, but in her chest dwells a quiet pain.

 

She wants to be away. Not alone – she’s already so fucking alone, there’s nothing but fucking _alone_ beyond her window – but away, and away from _this_.

 

She doesn’t want to see spectres floating in the vacuum. Mother, brother, sister, father. Friends left behind. Colleagues lost in time.

 

She doesn’t know how to escape, how to move on from what has happened, how to keep going like usual. She doesn’t know how to talk to her crew, not when they splinter like this, like bark from a tree struck with ten thousand volts of lightning. There’s someone in every corner; someone in every shadow. The grief is palpable in the artificial air, and perhaps it’s muscle memory that has her tasting acid upon her tongue again.

 

Jean flits in and out of the bridge, a phantom in Ymir’s thoughts. She only notices him when he leans into her space to flip some button on the console that she has left unattended, and she startles with a shudder, as if prickled with a cold flush. He looks at her through narrowed eyes and a frown, focussing on her face for a second too long as if he’s critical of her second-guessing him, but she never tries to stop him. He sits in his own chair, but flies the ship from hers, as if she weren’t even slumped in it, a carcass of a captain.

 

He’s always been good at functioning. Always good at holding things together. Always good at carrying on. He would keep the ship functioning without her – without any of them, if it came to that. He would, and he does.

 

He says nothing, his silence sombre and damning. She feels his impatience bristle across his skin with every deliberate huff and jilted movement; he wants to talk. He wants to talk about this, about how they fix it and go forward – but she will not let him. She glares at him when he thinks about opening his mouth. She ignores him when he leaves the bridge to – to do whatever must be done.

 

The ship becomes a ghost town. Or, perhaps, it was already a ghost town – seven people who had escaped the constraints of time, given up homes and families and friends, forgotten what it means to age – but is now devoid of those said ghosts.

 

Ymir eats alone in the canteen that night. (That night? It’s always _that_ night.)

 

She realises she’s been staring out the bridge window for what could have been years – maybe she’s finally hit fifty inside her head – when she notices Jean has gone and not come back for some time. She imagines he’s with Marco, some semblance of better company than her, catatonic and useless.

 

When she unfurls herself from her pilot’s chair, her muscles groan and her bones creak, something like rigor having set into her skin. It’s appropriate, she muses, as she rolls her shoulders and stretches, her stomach growling as she does.

 

She drags herself through the belly of her ship with lethargic steps she fails to feel, her head bloated and clogged up with muslin. She thinks she hears quiet talking coming from the dorms, voices low, but the door not closed. It could be Jean, but she doesn’t stop to eavesdrop. She passes the solar deck too, and spares a glance through the porthole window on the door, the flash of gold and yellow from the black hole seizing her gaze with its gravity even now. The silhouette of Connie sits cross-legged in the middle of the floor, praying to the floor-to-ceiling windows. From the way his head is tilted up, it looks as if he’s talking to Sasha. The door is soundproof. Ymir wouldn’t want to know, even if it wasn’t.

 

The canteen is empty, stark and white, save for the blue benches around the table in the centre of the room.

 

She uses her voice for the first time in hours to ask Sasha where the others are; she’s hoarse, and her throat sore. She knows why; her mouth tastes like death, and it’s not something she can conceal behind vacuum-packed curry and tasteless rice. She knows she sounds a wreck.

 

Armin is in the comms hub. Annie ate her supper at her desk. Mikasa has sat in front of the crystal all day and not said a word.

 

“I cannot seem to locate Flight Engineer Yaeger,” Sasha says, and Ymir bristles with how the A.I’s voice sounds so robotically insincere. “One of the airlocks is engaged. Is he currently overseeing repairs?”

 

“No, Sasha,” Ymir grunts back, poking at a stodgy lump of chicken. “No, he’s not.”

 

There’s a moment of silence, and then–

 

“I cannot seem to locate Flight Engineer Yaeger. One of the airlocks is engaged. Is he currently overseeing repairs?”

 

Ymir stills; she puts her fork down and swallows thickly, closes her eyes for the strength of mind.

 

“ _No_ , Sasha,” she repeats again, her tone a threat. “Eren is _not here_.”

 

…

 

“I cannot seem to locate Flight Engineer Yaeger–”

 

“ _Sasha._ ”

 

 “–One of the airlocks is engaged. Is he currently overseeing repairs?”

 

“No, he’s not!” she all but shrieks, surging to her feet and sending her plate flying with a wretched slap of her hands. It clatters to the ground with a dull, plastic rattle. “He’s fucking _dead_ , do you get that?! He’s not coming back! Why don’t you understand?!”

 

Sasha doesn’t reply, and Ymir heaves, her breaths hot and heavy. Her eyes fall to the mess of her half-eaten dinner splattered across the floor. She begins to crack. She’s going to cry over spilt tikka masala. She looks a fool.

 

She’s on her hands and knees with a bunch of paper towels when Sasha finally speaks again.

 

“Captain.”

 

Ymir breathes out and counts to three. She sniffles pitifully.

 

“Yeah, Sash?”

 

“I think my programming has been compromised by the crash,” Sasha replies, almost meekly, as if apologetic for the state of her captain. “I detect damage to my circuit boards. I fear my comprehension and intuition processors may have been ham– ham– hammer-head shark.”

 

Ymir snorts, but mucous flies from her runny nose as she does, splatting across the back of her hand. She groans in disgust, unable to ride the wave of Sasha’s indiscretion. She wipes away the mess pathetically.

 

“It’s okay, Sash,” she finds herself replying nevertheless. “I’ll get Armin to take a look at you. Can you run a diagnostic on yourself?”

 

“Yes, Captain. I believe I can.”

 

Ymir nods.

 

“Good,” she says. “Good. Do that.”

 

* * *

 

 

Marco is the first one to break the self-imposed silence. He’s not the sort of person to cope well with sobriety, a man keen on strange things like hope. Perhaps it’s selfish – perhaps he does it for his own sanity, unable to balance the anguish and the echoes – or perhaps he’s a far better person than Ymir herself.

 

 _It’s probably that_ , she reasons, as Marco squeezes her shoulder as he passes her by in the canteen one day between before-Eren and after-Eren. His fingers are warm; her shoulder is boney. He smiles. No-one has done that in a while.

 

“Hey,” he says, candidly, if a little delicately. His smile is the sympathetic sort, but it’s not pitiful. That’s important. “How’re you doing?”

 

They’re alone in the canteen, the others spread out across the rest of the ship, elbow-deep in copper wires, ears to transistors, or sleeping away the hours that hurt. Mikasa has yet to leave the med bay, sat in silent conversation with the crystal that inadvertently killed the closest friend she had, and that they had nowhere else to keep. It’s a cruel punishment, Ymir figures.

 

Ymir doesn’t know how to reply. The feeling of human contact is foreign enough that it numbs her tongue. Marco doesn’t seem to mind. He’s kind like that.

 

“I had an idea,” he says, letting go of her shoulder and wandering over to the kitchenette, talking over his shoulder, “We have a whole chunk of video messages from back home we still haven’t gone through since we got out of cryo. Maybe we could get everyone together and go through them. I know Jean’s parents have sent him a couple updates, and I’m sure he’d like to see them.”

 

Marco pauses, leaving a weighted gap for Ymir to reply, but she does not – not immediately. She chews the cud, poking and prodding at the gruel NASA calls porridge in the plastic bowl before her.

 

Finally, hesitantly, she asks, “Do you think it’ll help?”

 

“Maybe,” Marco replies, optimistically, “I think we need to try, before the silence kills us.”

 

* * *

 

 

It’s a bad idea.

 

Marco’s cheerful voice over the comms sounds fake, forced, hollow to the core, and it makes Ymir twitch. And it’s a twitch that doesn’t stop when they’re gathered on the bridge – all seven of them – and it’s the first time they’ve all been together since the airlock, and the silence is unbearable. Ymir itches. She wants to scratch her skin red raw, be free of the tremor, of the tic. She wants to bleed across her seat, across the console, across her crew, and paint them with the colour they already bare invisibly.

 

“Alrighty,” the Martian says, forcing a smile as he pulls down a screen from the ceiling, tapping buttons on the Holo in his hands. “Shall we get this started then? I think there’s quite a lot – I mean, we have eight years of mail to sort through, so I –”

 

The first video message is for Jean. It’s his parents. His happily-married parents, his father a politician, his mother in domestics. His proud parents, who watched him receive his diploma from the Lunar Academy, who cheered for him in the front row. His _alive_ parents

 

It stings every time, and Ymir’s been scouring the solar system with Jean for a long time now.

 

There are three messages for him, each two years apart. It’s weird to see his parents getting older in the space of mere minutes, but the grey scatters like pepper through the hair of his father, and his mother’s eyes crinkle.

 

Connie’s parents talk about immigrating to Mars – and they do – and then they come back when the climate didn’t agree with them, and Mr. Springer just couldn’t pick up the language.

 

Marco has a new baby sister, on top of the three he already had before he left. Her name is Mina, and she’s a tiny bundle of white cloth and pink cheeks in the first of his video messages. She’s three in the next, six the one after, seven-and-a-half and boasting to the brother she has never met about joining the astronaut training programme in the last.

 

Armin’s grandfather dies. Or _died_ , as it were. The first message is from just six weeks after they went into cryo, and the old man with the floppy hat that looks so out of place against his crisp, white uni, smiles a toothy grin at the camera and proudly shows off a new-old book he managed to get his hands on through some roundabout way. Two years later, and it’s a blank-faced man from the IASA grimly telling them that Armin’s grandfather passed away peacefully in his sleep. He didn’t suffer.

 

It’s surreal.

 

It hurts.

 

There is no-one to send Ymir a message. She lost them all to timber shacks and gaps in the walls and coughed-up lungs. She left them behind in the dirt and the dust of jetting desperately across the cosmos. She sees them all at her window anyway.

 

“Okay,” Marco says, his voice a little hoarse after seeing Armin’s messages. He blinks back tears he tries not to let the rest of them see, even though they’re all doing the same. “Let’s see what’s next.”

 

He clicks on the next message – for Annie – but a red message pops up on the screen: RESTRICTED. Marco huffs a noise of surprise; Ymir frowns. She catches Jean looking at her from the corner of his eye.

 

“That’s weird,” Marco says, “Maybe the crash fried this one?”

 

“I can try a system restore,” Armin pipes up, sniffing heavily as he wipes his nose on the back of his hand, “I usually store encrypted copies, just in – just in case, as it were –”

 

“No,” Annie says, quickly, and Ymir can’t help but turn to look. “It will be from my superior officer. You don’t have the security clearance, Dr. Bodt. I will take it to Nav and watch it there.”

 

Marco pouts his lips, but nods, fingers rattling quickly across his Holo; Ymir watches as the message is sucked towards the bottom of the screen, disappearing across the wires.

 

Annie stands primly and properly, dusting down her thermals of dust that is not present, and leaves the bridge without a word. No-one speaks for a moment. Jean frowns. Ymir notices.

 

“Well,” Connie says, jovially, “That was _weird_.”

 

Someone laughs – briskly, dryly – but it’s still a laugh. It doesn’t last.

 

The next message is for Eren.

 

The sharp intake of breath from them all is palpable. Mikasa tenses up, every muscle in her body becoming steel. Her jaw twitches.

 

“We don’t have to watch this,” Ymir finds herself saying, looking directly at the doctor. “We shouldn’t watch this – Mikasa, if you want –”

 

Mikasa doesn’t look at her. Doesn’t acknowledge her. She stares straight forward, at the screen, with lips drawn tight, and perhaps hatred upon her face. Ymir feels her heart plummet into her gut. Maybe it begins to dissolve there too.

 

Dr. Yaeger talks on screen. Carla Yaeger appears in the corner, her smile sunny, and her wave friendly. She wishes Eren well. She asks him if he’s been eating. She wants to know how Armin and Mikasa are doing.

 

She tells him to stay safe.

 

Mikasa stands before it’s finished, her chair screeching shrill across the floor with how suddenly she’s on her feet. She clenches her fists at her side, her knuckles translucent white.

 

There’s ferocity in her eyes that Ymir has never seen before.

 

She turns tail and storms from the bridge with fire in her wake, her footsteps smouldering, pluming acrid smoke. Ymir doesn’t know what drives her to follow, but she does, sliding out of her chair with little grace and elegance, almost tripping over her own feet as she gives chase, hearing Jean’s hushed, “turn it off, Marco, turn it off,” fizzle out behind her.

 

Mikasa stops just beyond the bridge, slumping against the white plastic panels of the tunnel, her shoulders sagging and her knees threatening to give way. She doesn’t know Ymir has followed until Ymir makes the mistake of speaking.

 

“Mikasa –”

 

“Don’t!” Mikasa snaps, “Don’t, Captain!”

 

 _Don’t_. Ymir is usually so good at following orders. But maybe her selfish quest for retribution matters more. If she apologises enough, will it stop the guilt? Will it make the hurt go away? If she says it enough, can she pass it off as someone else’s burden?

 

How does one absolve themselves of feeling anything at all?

 

“Mikasa, please. Listen, I just – fuck. Fuck, I’m – I’m – I’m so fucking _sorry_ , I –”

 

“I said, _don’t_.”

 

Her words are laced with venom. She leaves, and Ymir doesn’t follow. Her skin blisters.

 

* * *

 

 

Ymir waits five minutes before she returns to the bridge – five minutes to blink away the heat that stings her eyes, five minutes to gulp back ugly sniffs, five minutes to straighten out her uniform, wishing she could scrub her name from the label of each and every item of clothing she owns, and return as nothing, as no-one, as one of her many phantoms.

 

The others are watching a message from some official back at CAPCOM, listening with deaf ears and watching with blind eyes, feigning their interest. Ymir slips back into her chair silently, but knows that they all watch, and they wonder.

 

The man on the screen is talking numbers. He says things look good. Promising. Minimal risk.

 

The video is only a month old.

 

“Turn it off,” Ymir says, and then, more sternly, “Turn it off. Now. Switch to security. Put the med-bay on.”

 

Marco’s eyes are curious, questioning, but she keeps her glare hard, and he does as she says. The live feed of the med-bay flickers onto the screen. Mikasa is lent over the metal table in the centre of the room, head bowed, shoulders stiff.

 

In the corner of the room is the crystal. It pulses pink and purple, and its soft glow bathes the room in supple light.

 

Ymir has yet to go down and see it. She does not want to. Mikasa utters the reason why.

 

“It’s your fault Eren died,” she hisses, and it’s almost lost to the crackle of white noise upon the comms. Almost. “It’s your fault. You killed him. You were not worth him.” Her voice cracks, splintering across consonants.

 

None of them have ever heard her cry, usually so stoic and demure. It’s a breach of her privacy, Ymir knows it. So does Jean. He turns the screen off.

 

“That’s enough,” he says, stern, “We have work to do. This ship isn’t going to fix itself.”

 

 _Yeah_ , Ymir thinks, as they all begin to file from the bridge, shoulder hunched and heads lowered, leaving her alone. Jean passes her a look she cannot read over his shoulder. _But who’s gonna fix us?_

 

* * *

 

 

There’s something to be said for privacy – in that, in space, one has surprisingly little. One is granted the distinction between being alone and being lonely; Ymir denies she is lonely, but has been for quite some time. The chasm of nothing beyond her window is both inaccessible and daunting, and not one moment does it relent. She is intrinsically aware of just how far away she is, be it from Earth, be it from the people around her, or be it from the sense of purpose she seems so fruitlessly to chase. She wonders if the thoughts in her head can ever be more than white noise, indistinguishable, untranslatable.

 

 _Alone_ is a different thing. Alone can’t happen in cramped corridors and over shared bathroom sinks. Alone can’t happen with beds on top of beds, with prophetic murmurs in the dark, with cameras pointed at their faces from every doorway and ceiling arch.

 

Alone can’t happen when you know when everyone sleeps and shits and fucks. Hell, when everyone _breathes_.

 

Ymir waits a few minutes after Jean leaves – seventy-five breaths, twelve drums of her fingers upon her armrest – and turns the screen on again. The security feed reboots, and there’s Mikasa, still, sitting on a metal stool in the centre of the med-bay, staring at the crystal in putrid, fuming silence.

 

Ymir wonders if it makes it better, makes it easier, makes it bearable. Perhaps shouting into the abyss works for some people. It’s never really done it for her, so oft left yearning for a voice to shout back.

 

The pink and purple light pulses hazily across the feed, a rhythmic, lucid heartbeat, near hypnotic. Ymir slips into its oscillation, caught in its flow and swept away into some distant river where sound and smell and taste and grief are washed away, and nothing exists endlessly. It beats like it breathes, and it breathes slower than her; she matches the rise and fall of her withered lungs with it: breathe in. Breathe out. The universe is vast.

 

 _Sic itur ad astra_. Thus one journeys to the stars.

 

* * *

 

 

She watches all the videos again. She’s not sure when she does, or why she does; maybe she’s just a masochist, and the only way to feel something that isn’t numbness is to hurt herself over and over again.

 

Connie doesn’t look much like his parents at first glance, save for his skin colour, but it’s all in the details. It’s in the squareness of his father’s jaw, and the lopsided grin of his mother, and twinkle in both their eyes. It’s not things one sees at first glance.

 

All of Marco’s sisters are beautiful, their full lips rolling over rumbling Spanish sounds, quick-fire and lick-spit, and Ymir barely manages to keep up with their blistering enthusiasm and wicked smiles. The oldest sister – maybe twenty, give or take a few years – makes Ymir fall just a little bit in love, in that way one can with a stranger on the street or at the other end of the bar. Her hair is wild and wavy, chocolate brown as it cascades across her breast, and there’s a mole just below her lip, which Ymir is caught by, imagining the taste of it as she kisses the jaws of faceless women in her dreams at night.

 

Jean’s parents still make the ugly part of her personality simmer and spit. She’s met them once or twice, maybe fooled them into thinking she was a professional, with her firm handshake and soldier’s stance, back straight, feet planted flat. She had fed them the things she thinks all proud parents wants to hear: _your son will be well served on this crew. I will look after him. He will do us proud._

 

False things, really. Things she doubts she’ll ever be adult enough to say with much sincerity.

 

She watches Eren’s videos last. There’s more than one, it turns out. More than the one they just watched, and she thinks, with a heaviness in her heart, that it’s for the best that they didn’t see the rest.

 

Carla Yaeger does not appear in any of the others. She died. An accident in Lunar Base 5, or so they say, Dr. Yaeger muttering solemnly about a compression tank leak, an explosion, a building collapse. There’s hollowness behind the man’s eyes. He’s a dead man walking.

 

The video is one year old. He won’t know his son has died too for at least another week.

 

“I’ll tell Mikasa,” comes Jean’s voice, gentle. Ymir still startles, twisting around in her seat and slamming her palm down hard on her keyboard, returning the screen to the inbox.

 

Jean doesn’t look mad. He stands in the bridge doorway, lent against the frame on his shoulders, arms folded, and one ankle crossed over the other. His expression is resigned. Defeated, perhaps. Tired. Really fucking tired.

 

“I’ll tell Mikasa,” he says again, “About Carla. It’s okay. You don’t have to.”

 

“It’s fucked,” she replies, “It’s just … just _fucked_.”

 

“What isn’t?” he says. He pushes away from the door and moves towards her, hesitant still. He doesn’t slide into his seat beside her, doesn’t perch on the console and face her. He stops a little farther away than she’d like, and she’s all too aware of a rift that didn’t exist between them before.

 

“I don’t think you should watch those,” he continues. It’s a reprimand; he’s using his authoritative voice; she knows him well. “Not at the moment. It’s not gonna make anything better when we’re stepping on eggshells as is.”

 

“Wanted to check out these bizarro code-protected messages,” Ymir lies, unconvincingly, bringing up one of the video messages addressed to Lieutenant Leonhardt. The password box appears on the screen. “I can’t get in, even with admin codes. She said anything to you about it?”

 

“I’ve seen her sending out broadcasts,” Jean shrugs, “Before, and – and after. Usually every couple of days. Figured they were nav reports, or maybe you’d told her to send out the – the – the obituary, or – well. Maybe not.”

 

He looks hard at the floor, scuffing his flight shoe upon the plastic. Ymir swallows thickly.

 

“I can’t do this by myself,” she murmurs, “You know that.” _You know the sort of person I am._

Jean heaves a sigh. He lets his eyes fall closed, and the quiet drags on just a little too long.

 

“Alright,” he says finally, “Alright. You should – you should write up a mission report. And a proper obituary. He deserves that much at least. I’ll – I’ll work on scraping up the remains of everyone else.”

 

“They’re in pieces,” Ymir admits, “Connie, Armin, _Mikasa_.”

 

“They’ve got to _not_ be,” Jean retorts, “We’ve got a job to do. I’ll just – I don’t know. Do something. Get them back on their feet. Give out more jobs so they can’t _not_ be on their feet. Something.”

 

“Sasha is still down. She’s got some sort of short circuiting going on, and I can’t pin-point it.”

 

“I’ll try and take a look at it now.”

 

“And we need to get that _thing_ into the lab. The crystal. Get it out of the med-bay.”

 

“I’ll ask Marco to start on it first. Give Connie and Miks a little more time.”

 

“And Annie.”

 

“… I’ll talk to her about the transmissions. Don’t worry about it.”

 

The silence envelops them, thick and staunch and sickly. The burden of their crew, their colleagues, their friends weighs heavily upon their shoulders; Jean physically sags beneath the weight of it all, his shoulders drooping. Both of them stare away from one another: him at the floor, and her at the stars and the blackest of black.

 

“Jean,” she says severely. Apologies always sting, even when she means them. “I’m sorry.”

 

“I know you are,” he says, and he looks up at her, uneasy. “Me too. _Me too_.”

 

From the corner of her eye, Ymir sees the screen flicker, and the med-bay security feed reappears, grainy and pricked with static. Purple-pink light continues to pulse.

 

 _What do_ I _need to do?_ she thinks.

 

 _Hurry up and get better_ , Jean would tell her.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Stardate: _82153.15, 2572 days since Mars departure_

 

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER ADDRESSING CAMERA, PROVIDENTIA BRIDGE]

 

[TRANSCRIPT]: _I want this to go on record as the official obituary of Flight Engineer Eren Yaeger of Lunar Base 5. Word for word. I want this to be what’s read out over the HoloCast – none of that bullshit scripted shit, or whatever NASA usually releases when something like this happens, okay?_

 

_Eren Yagaer was a good kid. He was a kid. That’s important, yeah? He was twenty-three years old when he died during the Janus II mission in the year 2153. This was his first crew. I was his first Commanding Officer._

 

_And he put his life on the line to keep all of us alive. That was the sort of person he was. Not all astronauts are brave. But he was. Fucking stupidly._

 

_Eren Yaeger was also the best damn flight engineer I’ve ever met. If something broke, he’d know how to fix it. If something could be better, he’d improve it. If he believed something needed doing, he’d tell us incessantly until it was done. I listened most of the time, y’know? Even if I tried to be stubborn about it. He usually knew what he was talking about, even if he padded it out with way too much –_

 

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER THROWS HANDS IN THE AIR, INSINUATING THE DECEASED’S APPARENT ENTHUSIASM]

 

_Yeah. Maybe I shouldn’t have listened this time. But we found something. Eren found something. And we don’t know know what it is yet – maybe we never will, maybe it goes beyond what we can feasibly imagine, y’know? But it’s something, and I am going to try my fucking damnedest to make sure Eren Yaeger’s name gets attached to it and he gets the recognition he deserves._

 

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER STOPS TALKING AND APPEARS EMOTIONALLY DISTRAUGHT]

 

_Fuck NASA. Fuck Earth and fuck the human race. Only one thing matters when you’re up here, and Eren knew what that was. The unknown. The great, big fucking unknown._

 

* * *

 

 

Ymir awakes in her pilot’s chair, on some analogous night between suffering and infinity. She hasn’t slept in her bed in three days, or three millennia, perhaps, and her neck thanks her for it, stiff and achingly painful.

 

The bridge is cold. Not chillingly so, but enough to have goosebumps peppering her naked forearms and an uncomfortable ripple beginning in her toes and fingers. The overhead lights are dead and black, untriggered by a lack of movement upon the deck; the space is lit by the pale blue of console lights, and the lucidity of distant stars, milky white.

 

She had been dreaming of the sky at sunrise – a real, Earthen sky, all pinks and purples and liquid violets, oranges that set dew-wet fields alight with fire, yellows that bore bird song beneath fatal gaps in window panes and beneath doors. She almost feels her eyes pulsing now, in the same way they always would when she gazed at the sun for just far too long, but knows, truthfully, the pressure in her temples is from lack of sleep and built-up stress, for her skin does not share in the same memory of the sun. She prickles with the cold, not soothed by the brush of a candid sun that knows not what it overlooks.

 

The day before comes back to her in drips and drags, the haze of the dream melting away to the sour taste of reality.

 

Jean had gathered them all together, just as he said he would. He had scraped their bloody remains from the corridors of the ship and assembled them on chairs in the cafeteria, and told them all to remake themselves of metal or of plastic, and not pithy things like sinew and bone. He had told them sharply that the ship would not be fixed with grief, their mission not completed by dwelling on sorrow.

 

It had felt so empowering for a moment. Ymir had believed his words, as if the man standing over her was her commander, was Erwin Smith before the wreckage he became, and she was just another lowly pilot, ready to take orders. She had believed that they could be fixed, purely because Jean told them that they would be. Something about him is always so very _real_.

 

It hadn’t lasted. Maybe she’s too little a realist, or maybe she’s too much. Both Annie and Mikasa had adamantly refused to begin work on the crystal, with Annie rationalising that they should lock it up and deliver it safely to Europan military space when they returned home, and Mikasa demanding it be thrown overboard for the loss suffered and the hole carved out of her chest. Connie had shouted at her for it, the bags beneath his eyes as taut as the whip in his voice.

 

 _Eren wanted it brought aboard_ , he had snapped, _Eren would’ve wanted us to keep going. Eren would’ve wanted us to find out what that thing is!_

 

Mikasa had stormed out. Ymir had not made the mistake of following her this time, but she had reeled like she had.

 

Ymir rubs her eyes now with the heels of her palms, grinding sleep dust only further into her lashes. There’s something like a dry and bitter laugh that hangs, baiting, in her throat; it feels manic, self-depreciating in the sense that _what sort of Captain lets her crew fall apart like this? It’s a fucking joke._

 

There’s an easy answer to that question: one that doesn’t take scouring the universe to find.

 

 _A bad one_.

 

The threads of the black hole continue to twinkle, spindles of gold light creeping across her peripheral like individual neurons, reaching out into the dark for something to feel, to prick, to alight with. Sparkling hands made of planetary dust with creeping fingers, willing to take her hand beneath the guise of a friend, and lure her into infamy.

 

She doesn’t often long to go back, but tonight she does. She wishes she could step back in time and scold herself for not sticking with her gut. She wishes she could reach out and grab Eren by the scruff of his neck and pull him back from the brink. She wishes she could tell her sixteen-year-old self that all these long range missions are going to kill her. Have already killed her. She’s borne the brunt of too many years for just one human being.

 

She thinks about turning off the thrusters, and letting the Prov be sucked away, spiralling down the plug hole, into the mouth of this hungry God. Within the event horizon, all the trajectories that would carry her away from the black hole would point into the past. She could see Eren again, in that place in time and space where he is still alive and laughing.

 

Maybe that’s what it takes – to be better. Maybe that’s how everyone does it. They make their mistakes in one life, and then they go back, time and time again, and learn how to fix them. Maybe it’s one, grand secret she is yet to be privy to. With life comes rebirth, over and over and over again. Maybe she has lived one thousand lives before, or maybe she has one thousand lives still to come.

 

She shudders. The past terrifies her just as much as the future and the infinity. The universe sizzles and thrums with entropy. Chaos is the natural form of all things. Disorder is favoured. Law is the order of petty men. Who is she to demand the laws of thermodynamics play truant at her whim?

 

She will be tossed and turned by whatever current deems her moveable, and she will forever be swept away with it.

 

She cradles her forehead in her palms, resting her elbows on her knees as she curls in on herself. It’s been the same for years and years, this staccato rhythm of self-hating thought. She just wants to be rid of it. She just wants someone, something, _somewhere_ , to tell her: _this is why you’ve really suffered. This is what it all means. It’s not chemistry, not physics, not the law of the universe. It’s for your purpose._ It’s every dream she’s ever had. Every fantasy she’s dared indulge. A lighthouse in the distance of a home she’s yet to find –

 

She thinks again of the crystal in the med-bay, of one thousand, unanswered questions, and she stands abruptly, staggering on her feet. Her head swims as she dabbles more than her toes in that river that leads off cliffs and waterfalls, over which there is no way back. This is what she does, time and time again: stand upon the precipice and goad the darkest thoughts with promises that one day, one day soon, she will be theirs. But not yet. She’s not quite ready. She still has to _try_.

 

* * *

 

 

The med-bay reeks of antiseptic – and not in a pleasant way, like the benzene-sweet stench of hydrocarbons at Lunar Base 7’s fuelling station always had her feeling some kind of loose euphoria. The smell of hospitals has never been a reassuring one, an indescribable mix of a house well-lived in, yet disinfected to within an inch of burning holes through the floor with the sharp sting of iodoform.

 

Ymir wrinkles her nose. It smells worse when she’s alone, unable to be distracted by Mikasa’s disparaging glances and the beeping of the cardiographs hooked up to the wireless sensors they all have embedded beneath the skin in their breast.

 

Shadows are heavy and drawn-out across the room, clinging to metal tables and IV drips and the pile of equipment they managed to save from the remnants of the lab after the crash. The space feels tight with so much clutter, the ceiling lower than Ymir remembers. The edges of her reality feel soft and blurry, but in a way that has her worrying she won’t know how close she is to clipping her hip on a sharp side until it’s too late.

 

She knows why she’s here. Eventually, everything connects. That’s the philosophy that has kept her functioning for this long.

 

They found that crystal for a reason; they traded it for Eren’s life _for a reason_. Just maybe it’s _her_ reason. It can’t hurt to try, right?

 

 _Do something_ , she hears Jean say inside her head. _Do something or you’ll wither and die, Ymir. You toy with it too much. One day it’ll really happen._

 

Light pulsates from beneath the cubicle curtain in the corner, beating much like the rhythm of her heart as it floods the fuzzy, stainless-steel outlines of the metal table in the centre of the room with flushes of magenta-pink. It makes the shadows seem bluer: shades of indigo bordering on the midnight.

 

A hum of static thrums in the air, matching each pulse of purple light, each note almost mistakable for the low, melacholic quivering of a violin. The sound settles in Ymir’s chest, vibrating her sinew and her cartilage; everything around her seems slow now. Even a blink in the blue-dark takes moments.

 

She rolls back the curtain, not hesitantly, but _languorously_ , finding herself unhurried, unbothered, unenduring. The core of pink light, devoid of shape and form, hangs in suspension inside a stasis pod, atop a metal table. If she were to reach in and take it in her palm now, she wonders if it would feel the same as a human heart; have the same weight; the same give beneath prodding fingers. It’s the first time she has looked upon the crystal that they found on the surface of that purgatory planet with her own eyes in three days.

 

It’s hard to explain the feeling that wells within her: a combination of so many emotions at once she can hardly bare it, and a dawning feeling she has never felt before, an alien born within her chest, begging to burst free of the confines of her rib cage violently.

 

 _What is it?_ So simple a question, but so hard an answer. No human has ever looked upon this before and assigned it a name, and origin, a species, a purpose. It’s not a feeling that can be placed in words, in the sense than one can never imagine what an unknown colour could look like until it’s seen, only merely theorise the possibility of its existence.

 

She’s not even sure she could do that. The inexplicable puzzle of what lays before her makes her head pound. Maybe that’s reality crumbling away around her, atom by disillusioned atom.

 

The stasis pod is hooked up to some serious looking equipment, drowned in tangled wires that aren’t as organised or tagged as Armin would usually like. The electromagnetic walls shimmer, moments of holography catching Ymir’s eye like the sheen of fish scales in sunlight. One of the screens upon the wall shows a live infrared spectrum, periodic peaks spiking upon the baseline like a cardiogram.

 

Ymir places her palm flat upon her chest. Maybe it’s her imagination, but the infrared pulses sync with her own circadian rhythm. _Ba-dum. Ba-dum._ She counts imaginary beats within her head.

 

“Are you alive?” she says aloud, to the crystal, although it’s not really a question. Not really. She casts her eyes down, and it’s her own hand she’s looking at. _Are you alive?_

 

She imagines her fingertips turning to dust, iridescent in the pink and purple neon that shudders in the blue-dark. She drifts away in the artificial air, weightless, wandering. She sees herself disintegrating, unburdened by her own three dimensions and the confines of rationality.

 

She blinks. Her fingers are still there.

 

Something changes in the hum of the crystal. A higher tempo, a shriller note – she’s not sure. But something changes, and so she looks up –

 

And there’s something. Not a physical something, not a corporeal something, but a beckoning that she feels deep within her thrumming bones. The light around her concentrates, condensing into fogs of slathering pink that she might cut with a knife in the dark.  Something begs her forward, guiding her as if one hundred dust-made hands ghost across her back, pushing her gently forward whilst the magnetic hum becomes spectral whispers trickling through the hairs on the back of her neck.

 

Her feet fall soft upon the cold, hard floor. She does not hear her footfalls, nor her breath in her ears, but she hears the seethe and sigh of puppet strings tugging her hence, a summon that she just can’t shrug.

 

She stands entranced before the crystal, drowsy, dozy, prophetic, somehow.

 

_Are you alive?_

 

_Maybe._

 

Her fingertips pierce the veil of pink light tentatively, a hesitant, yet earth-moving first contact that fills her head with an orchestral crescendo. Her fingers burn with that same way both hot and cold burn – but somehow she knows she feels neither, dabbling in a fire that isn’t a fire. Emptiness and substance seem to exist simultaneously, and she tilts her head in confusion, staring at her hand as it floats and bobs beyond her benediction, as if riding a tide she cannot see or feel, but knows is there. 

 

The hum of the crystal grows in her ears, not unpleasant, but building, as if towards something sanctimonious. She feels the sound fill her like a choir in some great hall of the times of old, when buildings were still stone, and ceilings towered far, far above heads when the human race could still afford luxuries like space and art.

 

It feels as if a thousand different fingers brush the skin on the back of her hand – and it’s not skin-on-skin she feels, but skin-on-voice, perhaps, as if touch and sound have merged to become one, and what she touches are notes no-one has ever heard, chords no-one has ever struck. She is spell-bound in a serendipitous, magnificent moment.

 

 _What are you?_ she says within her head, turning over her hand in the pink light achingly slow, and presenting her palm face-up. _You know I’m here?_

 

The crystal pulses a darker purple then, and Ymir snaps her hand back to her chest with a yelp, clutching her fingers in the palm of her other hand fiercely. She stumbles a step back, nearly tripping over the curtain rail.

 

But nothing happens. The crystal burns purple, waltzing like a flame for a quixotic moment, before it fades to pink again, calm and serene. The insectal hum returns to Ymir’s ears.

 

“What the …” Ymir breathes, eyes wide and dazed and _enraptured_. She takes a step back towards the crystal. “Did you – can you understand – I’m going fucking _crazy_ –”

 

She holds her fingers out again, but hesitates. The light pulses, and maybe it’s all in her head, but it seems eager, impatient, convulsing with a desire to shake her hand again.

 

She wonders what it wants – or if it wants at all. Maybe it’s just an automatic response, like  the way static clings to metal, or like magnets repulse and attract. She wonders if it’s the warmth in her hand, or the iron in her spaceman’s blood, or the consciousness that keeps her alive and desperate for the stars that confound her with so many mixed emotions, that has the pink light fluttering.

 

Maybe it’s just isolation sickness at last. Following in Commander Smith’s footsteps once more. Talking to things that can’t be talked to.

 

“Are you alive?” she whispers, her voice far-away from herself. “Can you feel me?”

 

The light reaches out, extending itself as far as it can muster, and it engulfs Ymir’s fingers with dexterity; she is tugged forward, not forcibly, not aggressively, but enough to know that it seeks her touch with either a greed or a luminous curiosity. The crystal glimmers transcendentally; its core blazes brighter, and Ymir can barely look, her retinae simmering with the bright glare.

 

She only looks away for a second – if she can even call it that; just a blink to stop the shapes wiggling at the corners of her eyes – but in the moment she lets her eyelids spasm shut, she is struck, like an electric pulse, with a feeling incomprehensible.

 

The grip on her hand seems to tighten, and although there’s still nothing _in_ her hand, and she can still move her wrist freely, she knows she is being anchored by something more than a neural handshake. And it’s a _something_ \- not a touch, not a light, not a gravity, but the feeling that she’s being spoken to. There are no words, no sound, no _voice_ , merely the notion of a response to her question. An entirely alien familiarity. 

 

Ymir feels the unmistakable caress of consciousness, far and beyond that of her own. She tries to open her eyes again, but finds them held shut, and it’s inexplicable and terrifying and makes her heart erupt, because she’s wrought with the feeling that if she wanted to – really _wanted_ to – open her eyes and look upon the corporal form of the crystal again, she could. But she doesn’t. She cannot.

 

 _Are you alive?_ she asks again without an utterance upon her lips, because words seem expendable where consciousness prevails devoutly. The universe is black and boundless behind her eyelids. _My name’s Ymir. I think we already met, but … but not like this. Do you understand me?_

 

White-gold light explodes behind her temples, and suddenly, she is not _here_ – or there or anywhere. The pink light of the crystal is gone; the walls of the med-bay are _gone_ ; and she falls through a vacuum of white space, prismatic with colours she cannot fathom, and energy that surges up through her veins and parts them like the Red Sea.

 

_Are you alive?_

 

She snaps her eyes open and twists her head around in panic, but there is nothing – _nothing_ , a vast whiteness, as wide and unwavering as the ocean, flat and dimensionless and infinite. No walls, no monitors; no earth, no sky. Her arms wrench from their sockets as she grabs blindly for some reality, but her hands swipe frantically through the absence.

 

She tries to yell out in terror, but her voice is nowhere to be found, and her body is alight with the sensation of falling, of _plummeting_ , and she’s flailing and thrashing as she scrabbles for something, limbs rigid as her body prepares itself for a crash-landing that never happens.

 

She heaves with the surge in her stomach that comes with zero gravity – that same upheaval as launching over a bump in the road, or taking a dive in the sim too fast – but her hair doesn’t whip around her face, and her clothes do not lash around her limbs and – is she even wearing clothes? She tries to stare at her arms, at her legs, look down at her chest – and is her body even there? She sees herself and doesn’t see herself, there and not there, and panic rattles around inside her head as if she’s reliving a hypnic jerk over and over again, being torn out of sleep with a rupturing spasm of her muscles.

 

 _Help, help!_ she wants to shout, whilst at the same time, both her voice and not her voice - the accumulation of a thousand different voices merged together like a choir  inside her head tells her calmly, _if you feel like you’re falling, that must mean you’re accelerating. Fluid filled passages in the inner ear detect changes in residual momenta. You are not in free-fall. This is not happening. This is a dream. A vision._

 

_This is not your reality._

 

But God, the white blinds her, and her stomach catapults around inside of her, and her heart hammers, terrified – _where am I, where am I, where am I? Am I blind? Have I gone blind?!_

 

Something emerges from out of the white canvas: a long, slithering black serpent, a river of dark gold, a vortex of kite strings, dragging along flecks that shimmer and sparkle. It spins like a corkscrew – fast and fast and faster – winding itself up into a drillbit infinity as it comes hurtling towards her.

 

Ymir yells out, struggling helplessly away from the spinning vortex, which whirls and reels like a butterfly caught on an updraught too powerful to escape, powerlessness as its wings are ripped to tatters of pretty colours.

 

But it doesn’t collide with her. It whistles past her, so close to her cheek that she feels the sting of the wind and the heat of a flare sear her skin, and sores upwards into the white void, a slither of wriggling shape that reminds her of serpentine dragons, up, up, and up.

 

It lashes around like a trout caught in a net, or a goat seized by a crocodile’s jaws, rippling and undulating, and then it’s coming back again, turning back on itself, soaring fast and downwards, aiming for her chest.

 

The thrashing serpent clips her on the ribs as it passes a second time, and the feeling makes her lurch with a cry, a scorching sensation engulfing her skin; she clutches desperately for the side she’s not sure is even there, for fear that a hole has just been blasted through her gut for how the black snake winds her.

 

Her hands find her flesh, and it’s there, she thinks she’s all there – but she blazes hot, red-hot, beneath her own hands. She stares up in horror as the wriggling shape turns back on her and comes again, this time surging through her legs and whipping around her calves, slicing her with whiplash and rope-burn, tangling itself around her body in ripples.

 

The creature has no shape, not really – an entity of white and gold and black, convulsing energy and frenzied movement – but then she sees it, between frantic blinks, hand-shaped ribbons that peel away from the serpentine body, grasping for her legs, winding up her arms, encircling around her waist, tiny fingers prodding and poking at her skin, at her bones, at her very _soul_ , in a way that feels alien, invasive, _forbidden_.

 

She stares in horror at the hands that wrap around her wrists, and maybe she’s hyperventilating now, because she sees within their humanoid shape something further, something else, as the white abyss she suspends within seems to compress and contract upon her and the ribbons that tie her up in ugly knots cut into her skin and bleed tangible pain. She sees blackness, and then stars, twinkling as a million frenzied fireflies. She sees voices, somehow, and the hulking groan of something metallic, something wires and computers and aluminium panels. She sees _Commander Smith was persuaded to take early retirement; he hasn’t been quite the same since you came back_ , and she sees _this is a promotion, don’t you think you deserve it_ , and she sees _it’s a Hyperion and it’s yours_.

 

Moments that have happened before. Words of which she already knows the rhythm.

 

Her heart flutters with a deja-vu, with the knowledge she’s felt this very same cocktail of emotions before. The guilt, the loss, the trauma she never left behind, the pride –

 

She sees a memory. Her memory. The hands that bind her flicker with shards of silver, rippling like sunlight across disturbed water, and are a _memory_.

 

 _Where am I?_ she wants to ask, _How is this possible?_ And it’s the same as it was in the med-bay with the crystal, where words are so suddenly obsolete, and her mind so suddenly simultaneously clear and full to burst, overflowing with the concurrent need to shout, and to laugh, and to _cry_ – that she only has to linger on the eve of a thought for it to exist.

 

She looks to another tiny hand, encircling around her fist, and in that stream of rippling black-gold, she witnesses the first time she saw the Red Spot of Jupiter from the station on Europa, and then the first time she and Jean caught a Martian sunrise amidst heavy hangovers, and then, the way her very lungs _shook_ in the shuttle on the day she left Earth. She feels them all at once; when she gasps for air, the sound is wet and messy in her mouth, and she stumbles over bewildered sobs.

 

Ahead of her now, more and more streams of memory are born from the endless white, forking off into rivers of gold, whizzing past her like shooting stars irradiant in kaleidoscopic light that spits and spurts from them like sparks of a bonfire. Some _whoosh_ by, so fast her eyes blur and begin to water, and some entangle with her legs, snag on her arms, run their deft hand through her hair, and – and it is _euphoric_. And not. A crazed moment of ecstasy, of flashing light and colour and thought and consciousness, and it makes her feel so small, so atomic, so cognizant that she wonders if she is being separated into quantum particles and scattered across the vast oceans of infinite universes. She has slipped through a crack in the door between dimensions, and the med-bay, the crystal, the ship are so far, far away –

 

And – and it’s all moving fast, so fast – _too fast_. Memories sprint past her at light speed, ripping through her with extraordinary bursts of energy that sear and burn and carve her down to the bone. They hurtle towards her like comets, and each train of time and space sizzles with the flares of gold sparks and black voids, and she is too slow, too _insignificant_ , cradling each like a winding punch to the chest.

 

Moments in her life soar by, blending her into stardust. Her eyes begin to stream; her lungs forgo breath; her head feels like it’s being torn apart with some skull-shattering, excruciating velocity.

 

She sees memories within memories, a hyper-dimension that goes beyond just the three planes of her existence, beyond fourth dimensional space-time, spreading out before her and beyond her and inside of her and more.

 

She sees the old farmhouse where she grew up, rotten wood and falling apart at the seams and the leaks in the doors and windows that killed her brother, and her sister, and her mother with carbon dioxide poisoning before she was even six. She wallows in their poverty, tastes the dirt, gags on the CO2 that cauterises her throat and lacerates her good and bloody.

 

She sees the NASA classrooms, old and dated and dusty and _forgotten_ ; smells the moth-eaten chairs and the damp-swallowed carpets; feels paper beneath the rind of her palm and a pen in her grip. She hears the instructors who laugh and scoff at the thought of _Earth kids in outer space_ , mocking her dirty clothes and lack of education, sneering down their noses with the word _undeserving_ like a brand white-hot; and then she feels the rush of hatred for each and every one of them, that paints her green and ravenous. She recalls the man who told her she had promise for the stars, and shoulders the glare of all the other children of Earth upon her back as she scuttles home to tell her father she’s getting out and she’s going and _she will not succumb here to the dust_.

 

She sees the white palace of the ISS emerging from the dark and star-spangled sky like a Valkyrian chariot; feels its cool, utopian plastic walls beneath her hands; tastes clean air on her tongue for the first time in sixteen years. She worships her first view of the Earth from the sky, and sniffles with the warmth of tears cutting into her cheeks beneath the visor of her helmet. She ignites herself with the rush of adrenaline from her first solo flight. She gasps with the spark of hot skin rutting against hers with the first girl she fucked and forgot.

 

She sees Jean, the shining example of a NASA golden boy, standing as a silhouette in front of the airlock window on Lunar Base 7, his perfect simulation scores clenched in his fist, and his hair near-copper in the sunrise over the crater lip, proudly boasting of dreams to travel the universe. She remembers Commander Smith and Corporal Levi, new wrinkles upon their faces for entirely different reasons as they stare into the heart of a falling star. She drowns in the terror that floods her bones and leaves her surrendering to the dust of a thousand cosmic calamities.

 

She wretches with the screams of Eren dying in her ears as he’s yanked away from them before their eyes, and hurtles back down towards his cruel and merciless infinity.

 

She sees the whole history of her life fly past her in an instant and a millennia, every moment simultaneously, every feeling she ever felt all at once, every second that she screamed and cried and laughed, and she knows she is about to burst. Memories of every book ever read, every film ever watched, every girl ever kissed lacerate her skin and she bleeds gold and ice; she remembers every word ever spoken, every thought ever wondered; every bad decision ever made, and there are so, _so_ many. She sees giants in the dark; great palaces of old, ornate with sparkling chandeliers and mosaic ceilings; red and black flags hung from brick houses, and people marching Goosestep in the street; the frozen, God-soaked planet before the first man, and the withered one after the last; things she doesn’t know, cannot know, but does – somehow does – and it’s as if all of it, all of human history, has been _shoved_ unscrupulously into her head through the channels of her ears and around the backs of her eyes, and it hurts, oh _God_ , it hurts, it hurts –

 

Ymir feels naked, all atoms and stars and her consciousness stripped bare, no _human_ body to be seen, and she convulses beneath the invasion of her very soul being scrutinised from all angles, her every flaw on show for the world, no – the _universe_ , to see.

 

_Stop, stop. Please stop. I can’t – I can’t – the ship, the ship, where’s the ship – I don’t want to be here–!_

 

Her fist – or where she thinks her fist to be – catches hold of the strand of a memory, and she clenches it between white fingers. It writhes and squirms, and she hears voices from within become mangled as they replay over the tops of one another; familiar shouting, the barks of commands, the rattle of the SAV, panic – _Eren_.

 

_Please don’t – don’t show me this –_

 

She sees him climbing into the SAV, and she watches herself let him; vehement nods are passed between these selves of the past, and she can hardly look, it makes her hurt so much –

 

If only she could reach into that moment in time, stretching her hand through the walls of the tesseract of memory that she tumbles through, and pull him back from that brink with a fist in the back of his EVA suit and a sharp tug.

 

She feels the shuttle shake beneath her feet; she watches the airlock of the SAV decompress in a rush of vapour; she sees him jump, again and again.

 

And miss.

 

He hits the side of the command module with a sickening thunk, and white noise blares across her comms.

 

In the glass window of her own airlock, she sees the reflection of her face, and it is nightmarish. Before she can even blink, his body is gone, and she has let him down once more of many.

 

_This is not who I am – it’s not, I swear –_

 

Oh, but it is, and she knows that more clearly than ever before. Girl who runs; Captain who lets her people die; woman without an ounce of leadership worth comment, and to whom everything must be a weighing scale. Selfish, selfish, selfish, and _afraid_. By God. This is who she is, and she is ashamed.

 

He was her friend, and she let him die. _Make it stop._

 

Tears crowd her eyes and her head pounds, spinning in circles and playing over and over and over again the same moment _–_ the same, damning moment _–_ as a crescendo rises in her brow, the clash of symbols, the clamour of drums, the shriek of violins building and building -

 

–and it’s just so wrong, so wrong, wrong, _wrong_ –

 

There’s a flash of pink, loud and electric and cosmic in all senses of the word, and then, with the loud clang of silence, everything goes black.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Captain? Ymir, can you hear me?”

 

Ymir grunts, blinking wearily against a harsh light that orbits like a spacecraft above her eyes. She makes out blurry shapes in the peripheral, but they’re all cloaked in shadow. She squints, and tries to raise a hand to her face, but finds her movement hindered by something taut plugged into her wrist.

 

“Ymir, if you can hear me, I want you to follow my flashlight with your eyes, okay?”

 

It’s Mikasa’s voice, but it sounds faint. The cold of the metal table she’s lying upon seeps through her thin clothes.

 

_The med-bay … ?_

 

Ymir tries to sit up, but regrets it instantly as something throbs against her temple and the room spins. The bright lights make her vision blur. She flops back down against the pillow with a groan, fingers flitting to her forehead; she feels a ridge of stitches above her eyebrow.

 

“Ow,” she grumbles, “What happened?”

 

“You hit your head,” Mikasa says stoically, the fuzzy shape of her hovering over Ymir’s head, swatting at Ymir’s hand to stop her picking at the stapled gash along her hairline. “On the edge of the curtain rail. You blacked out.”

 

Ymir blinks slowly, and the shape of Mikasa becomes … just Mikasa. A frown pinches Mikasa’s thin eyebrows together, turning down the corners of her red lips.

 

“‘S that all,” Ymir groans, “How long was I out?”

 

“Two days,” Mikasa replies bluntly. It strikes Ymir hard in the gut. _Two days? She’s been unconscious for two days, and – all because of –_

 

The wound on her forehead pulses with the memory of white, blinding light and searing pain. Her ears are still ringing. She’s suddenly acutely aware of her skin crusty with sweat, and the chill that ripples through her because of that. The table is solid beneath her; her pillow is lumpy; the huff and puff of the oxygen regulator above is like a wheezing athlete gasping in her ear. It’s all very real. _Hyper_ real.

 

“F-fuck,” she murmurs, laying the back of her hand across her eyes where they sting with the overhead med-bay lights. “Did – fuck. Did anything happen? Is everyone okay? What did you do?”

 

“We were fine,” Mikasa replies, treading carefully around the side of the bed Ymir is stretched out upon. She lifts Ymir’s wrist - limp and pale, where there is a needle stuck into her veins - and narrows her eyes at it, before turning to the IV strung up on the wall, and tapping it impatiently. The cardiogram on the screen above her head beeps in time to Ymir’s heartbeat, slow and lethargic.

 

“Jean took charge,” she continues calmly, “Sasha alerted us to the situation, but you’d been unattended for some time. We moved the – _the crystal_ to decon, because the lab is still out of commission.”

 

“Is there any – did you get a good look at what happened on the cameras?”

 

“No,” Jean says sternly from somewhere over Ymir’s head; she starts at the sound of his voice, and her body winces when she tries to crane her head back to look for him. He stands by the door, arms folded across his chest, and a near furious expression rigid upon his features. Beside him is Marco, and then Armin – and as Ymir begrudgingly casts her eyes across the room, she sees everyone is there, crowded around her bedside.

 

_Well, not everyone, but –_

 

 “Blind spot,” Jean continues, “The security feed’s been playing up since the crash, so the picture wasn’t clear. Some pink light, and then – then you thrown across the room.”

 

“She wasn’t _thrown_ ,” Marco remarks, his mouth a firm, disapproving line. Jean huffs.

 

“Sure looked like it to me,” he gripes, and then adds, muttering, “Dunno what the fuck you were doing messing with it before we’ve had a proper look. It’s not safe.”

 

“There was a spike in infrared activity,” Armin interjects. He takes a step closer to Ymir’s bedside, so that she can see him without having to move. He addresses her directly, which she laments, because it involves having to look him in the eye. “Sasha recorded it when you entered the med bay, and it accumulates in a large pulse just before you were – uhm – before you blacked out.”

 

“The same frequency as the transmission signal from before,” Annie adds, “But a different pulse sequence.”

 

“There’s a high chance you may have suffered some radiation damage, Captain,” says Mikasa. She fiddles with something Ymir cannot see, but she hears the tell-tale beep of a HoloTab. Something whirs overhead, and then a hydraulic arm extends from behind a panel in the wall, upon which is mounted a strange, intimidating-looking visor.

 

“I want to check for corneal ulcers or retinal burns,” Mikasa instructs, guiding the visor down to Ymir’s face. Ymir tries to turn away, but Mikasa fixes her with a no-nonsense glare. “Exposure to IR can lead to cataracts, Captain. You’ll be decommissioned if they’re allowed to develop.”

 

“ _Fine_.”

 

She lies still and silent as Mikasa presses the visor to her eyes, modelled like a pair of dark glasses, fixed to a large, daunting wheel. Mikasa warns her of a bright light, and then there’s a flash, and Ymir’s eyes begin to water.

 

No-one says a word, and it’s uncomfortable in more ways than one, to be watched by all members of her crew as she’s scrutinised from top to bottom.

 

It’s much the same feeling as she felt in the – in the void? In the white place. Intense vulnerability; inexplicable nakedness; nowhere to hide. It makes her want to squirm.

 

Was it real? Or a hallucination of her guilty consciousness? She’s heard so many stories of isolation sickness, of how it leads to seeing things, of how it walks spacemen hand-in-hand into madness. She wonders if this is shock, finally overtaking her, having been snapping at her heels in the great race for the last few days - if not the last few _years_.

 

She grinds the heels of her palms into her eyes. It hurts. It _hurts_.

 

“It hurts,” she hisses.

 

“Where?” Mikasa says, urgent. “In your chest? Eyes?”

 

 _Nowhere you can reach_ , she thinks.

 

“Captain,” Armin starts hesistantly, “Did something - when you touched the - the - the crystal, did something _happen_? Did you _see something_?”

 

“I don’t know,” she grumbles, “Everything went white. I saw - I was - I wasn’t _here_.”

 

“Ymir,” Mikasa says flatly, and Ymir can hear already the pointed questions forming in Mikasa’s mind. Psychological evaluation. Emotional disturbance. Unfit to serve.

 

“Where did you go?” Marco asks, more patient. “What happened?”

 

 _I touched it_ , Ymir thinks, _And I went somewhere else. What else can I say that doesn’t make me sound fucking crazy?_

 

“Hallucinations?” says Armin, looking at Mikasa. She purses her lips in a way that says yes without actually saying anything at all. Ymir hisses on a low note, pressed out hard between her teeth.

 

“That thing is conscious,” she says, flatly. Mikasa’s frown deepens. “I touched it and - fuck, I don’t know. Something happened. There was - _something happened_.”

 

“Do you realise how that sounds?” Jean says, matter-of-fact. “It sounds _weird_. The sort of weird that gets you checked in for psych eval when we get back home, Ymir. It’s not right. You hit your head, and God knows what else. You’re delirious.”

 

She should have expected this. Part of her thanks Jean for it, ever the pragmatist. She hardly believes it herself, and would denounce it all is a knock to the head or some sort of trauma response from what - from what they’ve been through, but -

 

But God. She’s felt pain, before. So much pain. Mother, brother, sister. Father. Prejudice against her skin colour, her background, her birth. Captain Erwin and Corporal Levi. Eren.

 

You cannot fake real pain. And what had happened to her, here, _there_ \- wherever it is that she went, that void - was more excruciating than all of that, all the losses and the deaths and the bad decisions that cost her so dear.

 

And Hell, she knows it’s not just delirium talking, not really, because she’s just _lived_ through the turmoil of all of those moments at once. All those memories burn as bright, white-hot flames at the forefront of her mind, clear and present and unignorable. Nothing but cold, hard truth can feel that real. It happened; she felt it all; she suffered.

 

“I’m not delirious,” she says.

 

“Mikasa,” says Jean, completely ignoring her. He gestures at the scar on her forehead. “What can you give her? We can’t deal with this.”

 

“You won’t give me anything,” Ymir growls, trying to pull herself upright once more. Her body rings itself dry with the pain of overworked muscles, but she manages, just. Her shoulders bow, and she curls her fingers over the edge of the table, until her knuckles go white. “That’s an order.”

 

“If I don’t think you’re fit for duty, you know full well I can overrule that,” Jean says, but his words don’t pack the punch they should. Ymir can feel his resolve is weak; he doesn’t want to be saying this to her. “I’m still acting CO until Mikasa clears you.”

 

Ymir turns her narrow stare on Jean, but says nothing for a long, drawn-out moment. The others begin to fidget awkwardly.

 

“The crystal is conscious,” she says at last, daring Jean to challenge her with the severity of her glare. “It’s conscious. It spoke to me. It showed me - it _showed me things_ that I know I couldn’t have pulled out of my head myself. I don’t care what that sounds like. You said it yourself that we don’t know what the fuck that thing is, or what it does, and - it was real. It was damn _real_.”

 

“Sounds like some sort of neural handshake,” Marco muses, earning sceptical frowns from Jean and Mikasa. His expression is remarkably open, and so Ymir is instantly drawn to him. “Well, it’s _possible_. We can’t rule anything out at this point. Did you - what was it that might have suggested, uh - consciousness on its part?”

 

“I don’t know,” Ymir grumbles, burying her face in her hands and breathing harshly through her nose. “I don’t know what I saw.” She feels exhaustion like a fog clinging ubiquitously to the backs of her eyelids. She changes her mind. “I saw Eren.”

 

“Eren?” Armin asks hesitantly, moving a cautious step closer to her bedside. “How did you see him?”

 

Ymir sighs heavily, peaking out between her fingers at her communications officer.

 

“Like - like in a memory,” she confesses, and part of her is embarrassed to admit it. “I saw - it showed me - I saw the memory of it. Of him. And I -” She falters, unable to continue. It sounds absurd to admit, but she remains rocked by the illusion that she has been all too recently disassembled and put back together in a hurry. She feels disoriented, barely herself. The colours of the medbay seem brighter, more glaring than usual. It hurts her head.

 

“Has anyone -” She grits her teeth. “Has anyone else touched it since I’ve been - since I’ve been gone.”

 

“No,” Jean says sternly, arms folded across his chest. “Connie wants to, but - we didn’t know if you were going to wake up.”

 

She seems something glimmer in his eyes then, which he tries his damndest to keep concealed, but fails. It looks like fear, and it seizes her with guilt.

 

“I’m not crazy,” she says again, near desperate. She hopes he can hear her plead. “I’m not crazy, Jean.”

 

“You have to hear what you sound like,” he says, but sympathy and pity tugs a softness back into his features. “You hit your head. There was a radiation spike. It’s - c’mon, Ymir.”

 

“Jean,” says Marco, “Maybe we should just -”

 

Next to Marco, Connie nods his head diligently. Armin casts his blue eyes to the floor; Annie, to the ceiling. Mikasa busies herself in reading Ymir’s vitals from the beeping monitors overhead.  The vacancy of Eren has magnitude, as if a hole has been carved out of space-time, and yet they’re all still trying desperately to ignore it in the corner of the room.

 

“It’s not going to hurt to run some tests, man,” Connie says. “We need to know what it is. Why it - why what happened, y’know, _happened_ -”

 

Ymir maintains Jean’s gaze, insistently. She doesn’t blink, petulant, and wills him to trust her. _Trust me. Just once more. If you’d seen what I have seen, you’d -_

 

“Fine,” Jean says, “Fine, Ymir. But I’m in charge until you’re cleared. Connie, Marco - tell me what you need. We don’t have the lab anymore, so we’re gonna have to be smart about this.”

 

* * *

 

 

Stardate: _82153.17, 2574 days since Mars departure_

 

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER ADDRESSING CAMERA, PROVIDENTIA BRIDGE]

 

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER SHOWS SIGNS OF PHYSICAL INJURY]

 

[TRANSCRIPT] _Dr. Ackermann has cleared me for active duty. I just -_

 

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER SIGHS DEEPLY, HOLDING HEAD IN HANDS]

 

_I have a concussion. Physically, that’s the worst of it. But - God, it’s fucked, y’know? I know what happens if I say any more. It’s not like I don’t go to sleep every night thinking about Erwin. Every night. D’you know what that does to a person, NASA? Do you know?_

 

_I guess you do. That’s why I’m not gonna say anymore. Dr. Ackermann signed me off. It was just an accident. That’s all you need to know._

 

[VISUAL: COMMANDING OFFICER CLOSES EYES AND SAYS NOTHING FOR TWO MINUTES AND FIFTEEN SECONDS]

 

_Dr. Springer and Dr. Bodt have set up base in the med-bay. The lab is still out of commission, and I dunno if we’re - I dunno when it’ll be habitable again without Eren. The more time passes, the more shit we finds that’s broke._

 

_Anyway. Yeah. They’re in the med-bay, and they’re running tests on the - on the - we’re calling it a crystal. Don’t know what else to call it. Don’t really know what to do, if I’m honest._

 

_Probably not a very reassuring thing to hear, huh?_

 

_I think something’s wrong with my head. Don’t put that on record._

 

* * *

 

 

Ymir watches the med-bay from the safety of her HoloTab; the security feeds are grey and fuzzy, but it’s easy to see Connie and Marco in their radiation suits, plodding around the crowded space like clowns, every movement slowed and exaggerated.

 

She hadn’t insisted on the suits - that was Jean, of course. No room for error. He wasn’t having any of it; cladding himself in the armour of precaution. Maybe that’s the way he feels better; maybe that’s the way he copes.

 

Maybe he thinks nothing more can go wrong if he tells Ymir to take it easy and not leave her bunk until she’s truly feeling better.

 

Ymir cannot bring it upon herself to tell him what she’s sure he already knows: better is a far-fetched ideal of less-suffering astronauts. She has long since felt it.

 

She’s happy though - or as happy as she can be, with the great sense of unease that lauds over her - to let Connie do what he must. He’s the one trained in science and analytics, and she’s nothing more than a humble pilot. He spits out words that mean nothing but sound impressive, listing off on his fingers all the different chromatograms he is going to run, all the different x-ray diffractions he expects to collect. He doesn’t need instructions from her, and Ymir doubts she could even begin to fathom them.

 

Ymir nods at him across the livefeed, and just tells him not to touch. He shrugs; offers a wry, half-smile that doesn’t last, dimming across the hours, as he calls back, again and again, with inconsequential results.

 

“There’s something else we can try,” he says each time, but his enthusiasm dims. Ymir can see how the word _hallucination_ takes precedence once more in the cradle of his eyes.

 

* * *

 

 

How does one recover from something they cannot even put a name to? It’s an illucid sort of suffering, Ymir thinks, to bare the brunt of what has happened to her, without _knowing_ what has happened to her.

 

Mikasa pokes and prods her with all sorts of needles; the base of Ymir’s throat is sticky with the residue of electrostimulation pads; the gauze that Mikasa wraps around her temples is as itchy as any string of swearwords Ymir can muster in her distaste.

 

She feels … it’s hard to say what she feels, on any day. Today, tomorrow, whatever denomination they have given this particular rotation through black hole space, Ymir feels hollow. She feels like she’s erect on hollow bones, and every part of her is filled with vacuous space. She feels fragile, dangerously so. She feels as if she is not here, wherever here is, and she is barely a fragment of herself, so thin and watery that light shines right through her, painting patterns on the floor. Her head spins relentlessly.

 

Where did she go? What did that crystal do to her? Who is she now? If she thinks too hard, she remembers too much. All the poignant memories shown to her in - _in that place_ \- bubble too close to the surface, all at once, and it’s bruising. Her very skin feels tender, winded by conglomerate emotion.

 

She thinks too long of her father, and then of her mother and brother and sister, all of whom she remembers with startling clarity now, which she did not possess before. She was too young, far too young, to remember them like this. It unsettles her, to the point at which it becomes vomit spewed out, once more, into the composter, as she shakes and trembles pathetically over the toilet bowl. (At least it keeps her from going back to the crystal. Not that byzantine fear doesn’t do that anyway.)

 

Mikasa asks her pointed questions that linger too much on the side of psych eval, and not enough on the side of genuine curiosity. Marco and Armin are more interested, Armin especially, which surprises Ymir. She always thought he was a child of reason, but in all honesty, she suspects reason eludes her now.

 

Armin is desperate to know what she saw of Eren. Ymir resents it, so much so that her mouth will not open for answers, glued shut by unknown forces.

 

Marco - Marco is both more caring and more calculated. It’s a trait that he has honed from Jean, Ymir supposes. He tries to make her retell the things she saw, the things she _felt_ , after touching the crystal. Ymir happens upon some of it, but the memories blind her like harsh light, and have her wincing away from admitting them aloud.

 

She does not tell them in full to Marco, anyway. She describes the white space, and the black serpent, and the sensation of falling. She tells him about being shown flashes of her basic training, of meeting the crew, of girls she once thought she loved. She skims over memories of her desolate home in the dust, of the people she left behind to die, of the moments she lived through that could not have been her own, unless it is true she has lived many times before, and forgotten.

 

Those things she shares with Jean. She does not mean to - but at the same time, she is desperate to confess them to somebody, and knows there is only one person on board, beyond the robotic voice in the ceiling, that will accept her burden, and remain selfish throughout it. (The rest of her crew would _unselfishly_ tell her to unload her fears on to them, and she just knows it would not be fair. She cannot be honest to just anyone; she fears the things it would do to them. But Jean - Jean resents the things they carry between them, but he also never puts down his side. They have an agreement.)

 

She knows he doesn’t want to talk about it, cynical and chagrined as he is. When he looks at her, it’s a mix of sympathy and severity, like he knows Ymir is running on a fine line of not being fit for duty, and he should do something about it, but she’s - she’s _Ymir_. His friend. His mixed-up loyalty.

 

She spills it all out without him asking, and then sits in the silence of the bridge, wrapped up in her command chair, and watches him as he diligently checks the navigation coordinates sent up from Annie. He pretends like he’s focussing solely on numbers and buttons, but his eyes dart out sideways to glance at Ymir, every few seconds. He seems restless.

 

“I can’t explain it,” Ymir says, simply, almost gruffly. “I can’t. It’s impossible.”

 

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he replies, “Or what you want me to do. You know how it sounds.”

 

“I know how it sounds,” she echoes, but weaker. “But I know what I saw. And you - you know _me_.”

 

“Unfortunately,” he mutters, and Ymir would reach out and slap his arm, if they weren’t still so steeped in grief and maladie. “I know you talk shit out of your asshole.”

 

“It felt so real,” she says, and her voice shakes with the honesty of it. “All of it. It was terrifying. It was - it _knew_ , Jean. It knew everything. All the real _shit_. About my family, about Dad, about Eren, about you. No-one else knows that stuff, but it did. And it pin-pointed it.”

 

“You’re grieving,” is all he says, but somehow, it doesn’t quite sound convincing. “You’re different now. We all are. It happens.”

 

* * *

 

 

Ymir doesn’t sleep. She has been laying in bed too long, seeing hours born and die again, with nothing to show for it. Insomnia is an infinity, and she knows all too well what happens when she tries to wrestle with infinities. People suffer; they get lost. She doesn’t go searching for sleep, and part of her wonders whether, if she did, she would ever wake up from it again. That same part of her thinks that she’d want that: at last, free from the chains of purpose and consequence.

 

She lies in the enigmatic dark with her hands knotted on her stomach, following the rise and fall of her belly, and her eyes cracked open, itching with fatigue in a place she cannot scratch. The dorms are never fully dark - which is ironic, she finds, because trust her room back on earth to be pitch-black in the dead of night, but here, in the literal chasm of nothingness, everything is pastelled grey with a chalky outline. She stares up at the underside of the bunk above - it’s Mikasa’s, and Mikasa never shifts in her sleep - and counts the plastic slats that support the mattress.

 

Lights blip blinkingly from panels in the wall; blue, mainly, and blue is a good colour. It calms her. There’s a twinkling about them that reminds her of the innocent side to stars - the wanderlust, the serenity, the sleepfulness. She could almost imagine the vibrato of a piano sonata wafting waltzingly across the room, steeped in a peaceful silence they since have lost in their waking hours; the interstellar lullaby would mingle effortlessly with the soft breaths from the bunks across the galley, with the circadian hum of copper wires murmuring beneath the floors, with the autumnal rustle of sheets as Jean turns in his sleep, caught in the nightmares behind closed eyelids that Ymir begs to delay.

 

Her body feels light - not in a weightless way, but in a manner that reminds her of free-falling. She is buoyed by an antigravity that isn’t there, and she feels simultaneously vulnerable to a sweeping gust, and stiff all through her arms and legs, in rigid expectation of hitting a ground coming at her at a million miles an hour. Deja-vu is not a companionable friend, but still it lays with her, sordidly; she fears closing her eyes, and tumbling through the void of white space again. It is the shadow of her every waking thought; she can only imagine what it would become in sleep.

 

She doesn’t feel herself. It’s difficult to see herself looking out of her own eyes; she imagines her consciousness floating above her bed, watching her in a probing, mysterious silence. She imagines turning over, and her body meeting the gaze of her soul, and not being able to read it at all.

 

She wonders if she has become a ghost.

 

(She doesn’t hesitate to question that part of her withered and died and was left behind on that planet with the blue-green sky and blackhole-rise. Perhaps she is dead in all but body. She figures, morbidly, she owes Eren as much.)

 

Something in the headboard of her bunk beeps and whirs, a fan spinning furiously to cool down an overheating circuit board. She listens to the blood of the ship, and how it hampers through its veins, even now, in the dead of what they’re crassly calling night.

 

The beep sounds again - it’s too quiet for anyone else to hear. They won’t awaken. She doesn’t think any of them have managed sleep in at least thirty hours now - too busy patching the wounds in the ship, or running test after test and coming up empty each time, or fretting over Ymir’s growing lacklustre, communicated in just as many lazy grunts and grumbles. She, on the other hand, spent two days underwater, and the same again lying upon her bunk and _recovering_ , and that feels like far too much rest for someone in her position.

 

The crack in her forehead throbs just to remind her as much.

 

“Captain,” comes Sasha’s voice from behind Ymir’s ear, through the tiny speaker beneath her lightswitch, and Ymir’s not sure how an auxiliary can sound _just as tired_ as her, but Sasha does, and it’s just another potent reminder of how exhausted they all are. Ymir half expects her to fizzle out into static mid-sentence. “Captain, there is someone on the bridge.”

 

“Yeah?” Ymir replies, glancing upwards at the bunk above and frowning. She doesn’t have it in her to snark at the A.I - not when Sasha’’s doing such a good job of currying favour with her feebleness - but she feels spread thin, unwilling to beat around the bush today, or any day. Her eyes are burning, begging her to try and sleep, even though the thought of hearing Eren’s last words in her dreams is more than enough to make her wonder if she’ll ever sleep again. “Is that a bad thing?”

 

The speaker croaks out a cough of white noise, but Sasha manages no words, tripping over the short-circuit in her wiring. Ymir’s frown deepens in the grey gloom. She heaves herself up into a sitting position, her neck cramping as she has to hunch in the low-hanging space, and glances across at the sleeping figures in the beds opposite. She can make out the lumps of Jean and Marco clearly, and she knows Mikasa hasn’t climbed down from above since she retired for the day.

 

“Sash?” she tries again, curiously. She slings her legs over the edge of her bunk, bare feet meeting cool plastic. She glances down the gulley of bunkbeds, and squints when she sees both Connie and Annie asleep, and grimaces when her eyes linger on Eren’s empty space. Armin is missing, but he’s always had a habit of drifting off in the comms hub, curled up in Annie’s old hammock. She doesn’t blame him for not wanting to sleep, not now. Not after everything that must be so much worse for someone who grew up with the boy - _he was only a boy_ \- they were forced to leave behind.

 

Armin doesn’t usually go to the bridge, preferring to call on the speakers when he wants Ymir’s attention, but maybe he wants the silence, or the stars, or both. Still, something doesn’t feel right in Ymir’s gut. She shivers, clad only in her sports bra and a pair of thermal leggings, and curls her thin arms around her stomach.

 

She tries again.

 

“Sash. Who’s on the bridge?”

 

“I am not sure.”

 

Her lack of clothing has little to do with the cold shiver that runs down her spine, but it’s not what she can really call fear. Her head is cloudy; she thinks she might be dreaming. Blue lights are twinkling in the infinity. There are eons inside her head and between her fingertips. She’s having some sort of other-world conversation with a slightly broken A.I.

 

“Roger that,” she replies, calm and collected as she drifts to her feet. No-one else stirs. They’ve all worked themselves into oblivious exhaustion. “I’ll go check it out. Thanks for telling me, Sash.”

 

The walk to the bridge is strange - cold and strange. Ymir rubs her fingers up and down her biceps and puffs on every breath, half wondering if the thermostat is just another thing they’ve lost in the crash. She wonders if she could see her breath, billowing and white, like a dragon. It’s too dark to tell. (She doesn’t notice that the lights in the tunnel don’t turn on automatically ahead of her, like a landing strip. Again, it’s her head. Something nebulous obscures her judgement like a cloud.)

 

The bridge doors are closed, locked but not deadbolted. She pauses a moment to frown, before letting her fingers skitter across the HoloTab fixed to the wall. She calls up the comms system on her console, and hears it fizzle the other side of the door.

 

“Armin, you in there?” she asks, voice low, throaty, and tired, barely a murmur. She waits a moment, but there’s no reply. She flicks her fingers on the HoloTab, pulling up the patch of the comms hub.

 

“Armin?”

 

There’s the sound of movement, and a clatter, on the other end, before Armin speaks, a little disoriented. He probably was just startled out of a fitful sleep.

 

“C-Captain?”

 

Ymir swallows thickly, and half turns her body back to the bridge door.

 

“Hey,” she says slowly, “Are you in comms?”

 

“Y-yeah,” Armin replies, “Sorry, I - I must’ve fallen asleep. Do you need something? Are you feeling okay?”

 

“No, I’m fine,” Ymir replies cautiously. The fog is clearing from her head, although it still drags a shimmer across her thoughts, not unlike a soft, wet mist disapparating across early-dawn fields. Still - she knows the bridge door shouldn’t be locked. That’s no fault of haywire on Sasha’s part. “Thought you were on the bridge. Don’t, uh … don’t worry about it. I’m just gonna - uh. Don’t worry about it.”

 

She switches off the Holo before Armin can reply in confusion, and turns back to the door. The logical part of her - that same part that dragged her idle carcass through flight simulations and basic training and standing on the brink of too many cosmic impossibilities - knows that her ship is damaged. Her poor Providentia, limping along the shorefront of a black hole with scraped knees and bruises along its back, trying not to get its feet wet in a lapping riptide - she knows there’s damage to the mainframe, and she’s knows it’s not fixed (how can they fix it all without Eren, she suffers to ask herself), and she knows one oddly locked door is nothing, but -

 

But the other half of her wonders what weight _knowing_ has in the deep recesses of the universe. It seems a shallow thing, here and now, in the graveyard of equations once thought relative, and hence proven false. _Knowing_ is just another human arrogance.

 

She cannot claim to _know_ why the bridge door is locked. So, she unlocks it. The door slides open with a hydraulic sigh. Something is guiding her forwards again: perhaps it is the grand impossibility of space, perhaps it is an extended hallucination after all, if not on her part, but on the ship’s. _If it can happen, it will._

 

The bridge is dark and freezing, and Ymir is struck across the face with Jack Frost’s cold backhand, which smarts upon her cheeks. She grimaces, taking an involuntary step back, almost tripping over the threshold when her ankles hit the doorframe - almost. But not quite.

 

Sasha was right. There is someone on the bridge, and Ymir is not alone.

 

Her eyes fall upon a figure standing at the console, silhouetted in starlight, and this time Jack-fucking-Frost plunges his icicle fingers straight into her chest.

 

Ymir gasps - and it’s not shock, not really, because she’s still floating somewhere far and beyond herself and tripping on transience - but the noise escaping her lips is involuntary. Her breath catches in her throat frozen, but when it splutters free, she sees it mushroom in the artificial air, humid and cold.

 

With the gold abyss of the black hole cackling somewhere off their starboard flank, the naked stars ahead of the bow cast a glow across the bridge almost milky, like breathed-upon glass, adularescent in its lucidity.

 

Maybe they’re running out of oxygen; maybe their air supply was breached in the crash, and is hissing with decompression somewhere in the hull of the ship; maybe this is isolation sickness finally rearing its ugly head inside her fucked up head, after so many years of her denying it would never happen to her; and maybe this is Ymir’s brain slowly starving itself to dust.

 

_I am hallucinating. Jean was right -_

 

A stranger, a _girl_ , stands before the console, silent and unmoving, staring out into the abyss with a tilted chin. She seems transfixed, for all Ymir can share in the sentiment; the girl’s hands hang loosely at her sides, and her shoulders are a smooth curve of unblemished shadow. Golden hair tumbles down her bare back in rippled waves.

 

She must be a ghost. It’s the only way to explain the encroaching silence - more tremendous than anything Ymir has felt in the depths of vacuum space; more resolute, more wistful, more completely other-wordly. Ymir can’t hear the creaks and groans of the ship; she can’t hear the whispers of the copper wires; she can’t hear the blood hammering at the wound in her temple. She can’t even hear her own breath. All the sound in the universe seems to have been extinguished with the dying huff of a candle.

 

The girl turns, and the pale grey light sweeps across the soft plains of her skin, pearly and prismatic; supple weight is cradled in her hips, and crescent-shaped shadows are strung like waning moons beneath her bare breasts. She is as naked as Ymir feels; her skin is pallid, near translucent in the cosmic haze, and her eyes are a striking, diamond-blue where they catch the light. Her expression is drawn - not into something distinctive that Ymir might recognise, but with the parting of her round lips, and the furrow in her thin brow, she caresses the precipice of curiosity and dazed wonderment.

 

It reminds Ymir of the expression so many cadets wear when they first see the stars from beyond the stratosphere. Glassy-eyed, wordless, ephemeral _admiration_.

 

The stranger’s eyes meet Ymir’s in that moment, and for a fluttering second, Ymir knows intimately the feeling of suffocation, as if all the oxygen from her lungs has been burned up in a flashfire, and it is supernaturally exquisite. Her throat seizes up, and she teeters on the brink of choking. She finds she has been gripping onto the doorframe so hard that blood has begun to seep around her cuticles.  Some part of her wonders if she is some breed of masochist.

 

The girl appraises her with her diamond eyes; tips her head to the side, as if in thought. Tears prick along Ymir’s lashline, cold and wet and foreign, and they tumble down her cheeks unapologetically, and she doesn’t know why - why - why - _what_ -

 

If this is a dream, she wants to wake - wake now, to the underside of Mikasa’s bunk above her, and Jean rustling beneath the covers, and her own frantic heartbeat in her chest, because whatever this is, she can’t hear it, can’t feel it, can’t -

 

“Ymir,” says the girl, and her voice is like nothing else Ymir knows, simultaneously two people speaking at one: a melody and a monotone, equally everywhere and nowhere, pervading Ymir’s senses in a way she can only describe as not just _hearing_ , but seeing, and tasting, and touching the sound of her name upon the stranger’s lips. _That feeling again, from before -_

 

She finds she can breathe again - and she cannot tell when she stopped not being able to. The world around her seems to shimmer. She expects it to fall away around her into a million shards of iridescent glass. She takes a step forward, against her better judgement.

 

The girl does something with her mouth: it starts as a twist, and then a grimace, as if unsure of how the muscles in her delicate jaw move against one another, but then it becomes a blossoming smile.

 

Ymir freezes again; finds her hand half-outstretched.

 

She finds herself struck with an empty feeling: one that reminisces of nostalgia. She feels a sense of familiarity, although she knows it isn’t possible. She remembers faces well. She remembers bodies better.

 

And yet, the smile upon the stranger’s - the ghost’s - lips feels reassuring. She’s naked, unarmed, and doesn’t move, quite unnerving in her stillness. (Is she even breathing?)

 

Ymir has maybe eight inches on the girl, and a lot more body muscle. She figures she’d be the one to have the upper hand if something were to happen - if she has any say in the physics of dream worlds, that is. She hasn’t dreamt in a long time, so it’s only reasonable that her first in so many years is all sorts of moonstruck.

 

There’s no way someone could be onboard without her knowledge. You just don’t get stowaways hiding on a four-year-long mission. And it’s not like -

 

It’s not like they picked anyone up on the surface of the dwarf planet. It’s impossible.

 

She counted the people who disembarked that space shuttle in too many horrible ways.

 

And so, Ymir figures: _what’s the worst that can happen now?_ Bad decisions don’t get held against her when she’s not herself, she reasons.

 

“Are you real?” is the first thing that dribbles from her mouth. It’s neither succinct, nor elegant, because she just wants to be _sure_. “Or is this a dream? Am I dreaming?”

 

The girl’s smile doesn’t falter.

 

“I’m not familiar with that word,” she says serenely, and somehow, it’s unsettling. “Could you explain?”

 

Ymir dares to take a step closer, letting her hands fall from the solid support of the door frame. The bridge is not a large space: there is, at most, six feet of space between them. The girl doesn’t budge; Ymir doesn’t reply.

 

She wants to test the parameters of this dimension.

 

“Why are you here?” she says, a little more curiously. She feels her guard - so usually battened down and undislodgable - slipping, and she lets it fall to the floor.

 

“Because I didn’t want to be where I was,” replies the girl. The certainty in her voice almost fools Ymir into thinking it’s a complete answer.

 

Almost.

 

Part of her realises that, in a dream, you’re meant to let something like that slip. You’re not meant to notice the abnormalities.

 

Quietly, she is aware of buttons flashing on the console behind the girl, in a Morse-like pattern she does not know well enough to recreate in her mind - damage to the airlock, compromises to Sasha’s programming, hampered power in one of their EMP drive cores. She can read the patterns well enough - she learned them all in basic sim, after all - but they’re not ones she had ever _hoped_ to read until they crash-landed that shuttle into the side of the Prov five days ago.

 

The ship rumbles beneath her feet; she knows the creaks and groans as the hydration system swapping out a used filter. Something hydraulic whirs beneath the floor.

 

Beyond the great, curving window of the bridge, the stars goad her. She knows these constellations; she’s been studying them for days now, mapping them in her mind when sleep escaped her and grief consumed her, wondering which she might be able to persuade NASA to name after a lowly ship engineer.

 

Not one star is out-of-place. Each twinkles with pristine clarity.

 

“Sasha,” Ymir says abruptly, almost a bark. “Sasha, can you hear me?”

 

“Yes, Captain?”

 

“Tell me something that I wouldn’t know,” she snaps, without removing her gaze from the stranger’s face. “But something that I’ll know is true.”

 

Confusion sounds in the auxiliary’s tinny voice. “... Why, Captain?”

 

“Am I in the med-bay right now? Am I lying on that damn table?”

 

“No, Captain. The bridge.”

 

“I need -” Her voice stutters; she grits her teeth. She doesn’t look away. “I need to know if I’m awake right now.”

 

“Your vitals suggest a fully alert state of consciousness. No unusual brain activity. Your breathing and heart rate are a little elated, but -”

 

“Just tell me something, dammit!”

 

There’s a second of gut-wrenching silence, where the veil of sleep is crudely ripped from Ymir’s eyes, and she is more awake and alert that she’s ever been, and is face-to-face with yet another impossibility that she doesn’t think she is damned enough to deserve.

 

Or maybe she is, all things considered. Maybe this is what greedy gets you.

 

“Uhm - Mission Specialist Leonhardt recently completed a mile run in four minutes and twenty-three seconds, which beats her personal treadmill best by two and a half seconds, a-and. And - Dr. Springer has decided that he will ask to get a copy of my programming added to the main hard drive of his personal accommodation when we return to base,” Sasha recites as a frantic list. Ymir doesn’t know how it’s possible for an A.I to sound panicked, but she wishes Sasha weren’t programmed with it. “On - on Earth, today is the second of August. It is the ninth anniversary of your father’s death. Is any of this good enough, Captain?”

 

“Sasha.”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Is there someone else on the bridge with me?”

 

If A.Is could gulp, Ymir knows Sasha would.

 

“Affirmative.”

 

How does one react in a situation such as this? Ymir cannot say she knows. Ymir cannot say she ever _expected_ to know, because what NASA simulation prepares its pilots for the chance encounter with a stowaway not of their own liminal space?

 

This stranger is not of the universe Ymir knows. Perhaps, she manifests from inner universes, born of radiation damage to Ymir’s retina after all; perhaps, of universes fed by a drip feed of isolation, that turns the bravest of astronauts into shaking shadows, drop by agonising drop as the years slip by, just as slow but just as constant; perhaps Ymir is still in the void, and never woke.

 

Perhaps, this stranger is a traveller from further spaces, beyond which Ymir knows or comprehends.

 

Perhaps it’s not in her head at all, and she stands at the forefoot of giants.

 

She cannot scrub herself of the possibility. They are all scientists in an uncharted land, after all. they must consider -

 

“Who are you?” Ymir asks.

 

A minute twitch in the stranger’s brow clouds her expression. She seems to hesitate on the brink of a frown, but says nothing.

 

Ymir thinks she should be shaking: fear, adrenaline, those things are all good bed fellows. But her voice is surprisingly calm; a cloak of the other-worldly extends across the bridge then, and Ymir knows she has stepped across time and space once more. Grand adventures do not lend themselves to petty human emotions.

 

“How did you get here?” Ymir asks. Her eyes roam across the stranger’s naked skin, dappled in white starlight. She is devoid of any imperfection; Adonis, in the flesh of a woman. The twitch in the stranger’s forehead dissipates. She appears less confounded by this question.

 

“You brought me aboard,” says the girl, her voice pleasant and feminine, but entirely matter-of-fact. Ymir swallows thickly, the next best thing to pinching herself. She should turn and leave the bridge and shut the door behind her, and let herself slide down against it to the floor, and tell herself this all in her head. She’s got a bruise on her temple that would forgive her for talking to spectres.

 

“I think I would’ve remembered that,” she replies bluntly, feigning confidence in her voice. Her gaze disobeyes, however, and flitters momentarily away from the stranger. “How ... do you know who I am?”

 

“You asked me if I understood you,” replies the girl with an indifferent shrug of her bare shoulders. A ringlet of golden hair falls daintily across her clavicle; Ymir can’t help but stare. “You showed me yourself, and I looked.”

 

It strikes Ymir then, that if this is a fever dream, she has out-done herself. She realises, without complication or hesitation, what the stranger means.

 

She needs not pull up the live feed of the med-bay on the security feed, for she knows already what she would see.

 

Or - wouldn’t see. Pulsations of pink and purple light has become blood and skin and epiphanous thought.

 

“I know what you are,” Ymir states.

 

“What am I?” the crystal replies.

 

“A God.”

 

* * *

 

 

(“What is a God?” Ymir thinks.)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys! Sorry it's been so long since the last update ... it didn't take long to write this chapter, but the fine-tuning took a while, because of the nature of the content. This chapter really goes all over the place! We've got the fall-out of Eren, the grief of Ymir and the crew, the really bad acid trip, Ymir questioning the veritability of her own head, and then Krista finally appearing! It's pretty wild, but also one of my fave parts of the story!
> 
> This chapter is chock full of a butt-tonne of symbolism, so apologies if the imagery is very dense at times. The bad acid trip into the void is particularly info-heavy, but for good reason. Hopefully it comes across really intense and really meta, and also, I hope you can peel back the layers of what Ymir goes through, because there's some good stuff in there with regards to the bigger picture of this project: the Cloud Atlas-inspired reincarnation symphony. 
> 
> Please leave a kudos if you enjoyed, and please leave a comment if you have anything to say, at all! Comments are much loved and so humbling, and I would be grateful to even receive one word!
> 
> I have a tumblr: the-prophet-lemonade.tumblr.com, and I also track the tags "theprophetlemonde" and "fic: another lover". My inbox is always open!
> 
> Until next time! I'm sure you, and the crew of the Prov, and Ymir have lots of questions to ask and answer ... here's hoping Ymir manages to cope, hah!


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